Damned Deists

[The Grand Nudger]

...not even a magic book to rub between them.

Maybe THAT'S why I sort of like deists.

Perhaps other reasons though: the Jains are awesome (though you entirely  discredit the Jains because of a scant few, very rare expressions of violence on their part).

Jainism isn't a deistic religion, but they do subscribe to a hilarious amount of supernatural claims and they do have magic books.  

It's not individual jains I discredit, btw, simply the claim (the one thing most people know about jainism) that their religion is one of the good nonviolent ones.  That's been true(ish) so long as they've been out of power..but it was emphatically not true when they were in power.  The christians aren't exactly getting any brownie points for having slowed down on the burnings and beheadings either. It is in this context that jainism is wholly unremarkable as a religion and has followed the same trends as any other. Jain extremism, contrary to the thoughts of many people who wish to hold the idea up as a counterpoint to the current majority religions, presented itself -exactly- the same way that christian or islamic extremism presents itself. Wrapped in piety, preemptively defending itself and the world™ through acts of individual and organizational aggression. The jain tradition, itself, was the first to attempt to whitewash it's own history with renunciation legends. Those legends are not capable of concealing the fact that it was central to the ideology of an expansive empire with, perhaps... the largest standing army in the world, at the time. OFC they wanted to play up peace once their borders were sufficiently wide, and later...when they found themselves the oppressed instead of the oppressor within those borders.

Political misfortune has tempered the tradition, just as is has with christianity here in the west. It remains to be seen whether or not the tradition and it's adherents, like most others, will lull back and forth between violence and peace (again) over the long view of history. The big religions of the past 2k years have been occupying alot of the space, and the relative and recent peacefulness of that religion may be an accident of history.

I fully appreciate that any given jain, or anyone who wants to provide a counterpoint, can say "they were clearly jainisming wrong" -but they obviously didn't think so at the time, and I think we've all heard that one too may times.