Can there be New Ways of Understanding and Practicing Ancient Religious Teachings?

[Belacqua]

Islam isn't the most progressive ideology, but I still think it would be interesting if there were some kind of "update" for it, although I would not want it to go the same way as mainstream Christianity.

Yes, very much so.

I think one of the main problems with modern Christianity is that it has adapted too much to an alienating society. Christians who declare that Jesus wanted us to be capitalists and to pass judgment on people unlike ourselves (thereby alienating them) seem (in my opinion) to have completely jettisoned the original message. 

But this is always the way it goes -- reformers and modernizers nearly always claim to be recovering something old that has been lost.