If Islam is a religion of peace why did it expand through military conquests?

[Sword of Christ]

Well if Jesus was Yahweh, and he obviously had some different things to say compared to what was told in the old testament

The exact same message the Old Testament conveyed overall just with some clarification.

His views didn't line up exactly as they once did.

He didn't come to abolish the Law but to fulfill it and all that business. Here we go.

"For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished." Matthew 5:18

There are times when Jesus didn't act like he was the same person as the guy upstairs.

He was and he wasn't at the same time seeing as he was a human as well as being God, it's a mysterious mystical kind of thing. It's easier to understand it as Jesus speaks with the same authority as God with the words of God. Not on behalf of God as a prophet but as God himself directly. Of course this was pretty major blasphemy for the Jews at the time, one the main reason he ended up on the cross.

If Yahweh inspired people to write something, and they got something wrong, then it's Yahweh's fault for not proofreading what was written or making himself clear enough.

Like anything in life you can't avoid human error. And it was humans he was having to work with. But the end result was a very good considering, using the material to hand.

Why were there tribal wars for land when Yahweh could have just given them uninhabited land?

He gave it to them by getting them pumped, filling them with the driving zeal, the berserker rage and what have you to take it from them. Everything God does in the Bible was through the actions and experiences of other people if you read it. As for Noahs Ark and all that business I think he got some angels to open up the flood gates in the firmament above the world to let the waters above in or something. It doesn't say he controlled nature directly you have a natural order with his creatures within it and an interaction between God and his creatures. So God was portrayed differently to Zeus or Poseidon who could physically and directly get involved in the action.

Because it wasn't about just taking land.

The instruction was to drive everyone from the land and leave no-one alive upon the land. So it was only the land that was being specifically targeted for acquisition not an ethic group of people as there were no further instructions to chase anyone who fled from the land.

They killed the women who had known men, so I'm pretty sure virgin meant virgin. Not just young woman.

Ah you mean this one.

"Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man" Numbers 31:17

We can take that as the human author in the culture of his time getting a little carried away with his zeal. If it's something Jesus wouldn't say then cherry pick it out, well sorted.

What makes you think Yahweh is the benchmark?

God is provider of the Moral Law and so therefore is the objective standard of morality that exists independently from the human mind. Otherwise it's your own subjective opinion or whatever there wouldn't be anything to grade it against.

all you have is stories written by men, eventually compiled into a bible that doesn't fit much of what modern audiences believe is right or wrong.

The morality is on whole quite good aside a few of the unfortunate parts you can pick out. You can see it as God attempting to guide his people who were a little rough around the edges and needed to be hammered out. You're reading the work in progress, and it still is a work in progress today.

Look, I can be self centered sometimes too, just like Yahweh, but I don't go around killing people for not following me.

That didn't actually happen as far as I know, people from other religions/cultures were to be treated as equals in Jewish society and not persecuted. People were to be stoned to death for apostasy trying to incite worship of foreign gods but this the nature of the ultra zealous culture of the time. Modern Jews don't exactly do this you'll notice.

You can't have a guy that can't be understood my mortals, and then say with absolute certainty that he's the very definition of good.

Humans have a really serious difficult hard time understanding God/Divinity but that's our own limitations not Gods. There are some people who don't believe God even exists at all. hock:

We're getting a little bit off Islam and it's peaceful nature here anyway. Judaism and Christianity did indulge in a little bit of force through arms conquest but was Islam entirely based upon it right from the start?