Violence is the Natural conclusion of Religion.

[RobertE]

This is the basic statement I made while in a discussion with a friend. He identifies as Agnostic.

He disagrees with my statement.

With the exception of strictly pacifistic such as maybe Buddhism, I believe the logical conclusion of most major religions is Misogyny, Repression, and Violence.

Now I believe most Americans (at least many of the one's I've met) have a fair bit of Xenophobia and disdain for most things middle eastern. Sharia law and the like are pretty shocking compared to what most are used to. But when some "good christian" derelict starts in with the holier than thou BS, my first though is always: "Wait a minute!, isn't Christianity just as violent and ignorant as Islam?"

Forgive me for using their name and repeating something that deserves to be buried (than pissed on):
The westboro baptist bastards. Are they not simply Christianity taken to the same extreme?

I don't care about being "right". I respect my friend's opinion and he makes good arguments. I just want to see what the opinion here is.

Indeed, whenever there is a terrorist act committed by Muslims in the West, it is shocking and I must admit, I do comment on the story along with others. However, then I bring up the fact that Christians, especially Catholics were exactly the same over the last two millenia, yet they reply with "but that was a long time ago, we are talking about today." This is what gets my goat in fact that most, if not all Christians just don't want to acknowledge that their religion was exactly the same.

To me, by far the most influential part of any religion is the oral myths. Without it, nothing else matters. If there is no myth that the bible is the word of God, it would sit harmlessly in the fiction section and not hurt anyone.

But yes, while such a myth prevails that a book is somehow magically true, the contents of that books represent the kind of thing believers could do in the name of that religion and accurately describe themselves as justified from a religious perspective.

Comparing the bible to the quran is a close competition, they are both sickeningly evil. Both are equally capable of justifying violence as well as all manner of other unspeakable acts.

I would expect that a christian theocracy today would not be much different from the islam ones we have. Luckily for us, secularism and human laws are able to trump religion on the whole.

The Qu'ran and the Bible are the same. There is no doubt about that. Mohammed was in fact an Arab whose family probably followed Judaism or paganism, until he decided that he had enough and start his own, taking some documents with him and thus creating the Qu'ran. Well, that is my theory anyway, I am not saying it is correct but there is a strong possibility that I could be.