A little world history is in order if one believes Muslims have any kind of monopoly on the killing and maiming others religions. They called the last time Christianity ruled the world the Dark Ages for a reason!
They don't have a current monopoly, the Buddhists in Myanmar are doing a pretty good job in Rakhine, but the majority of religiously motivated deaths and the bulk of religiously motivated persecution and oppression is Islamic. Sure, the Christian religion has had its weaker episodes, but I don't defend them. Thing is, on my next trip to London or Paris or Nice or Madrid or Brussels or Boston, I am very very unlikely to be slaughtered by a knight in armour en route to the Crusades. I'm afraid to say I can only deal with the world as it is, not as it used to be.
Then I'd recommend not prefacing your sentences with "It started off as a highly confrontational and discriminatory religion"! By the way, take a gander at this chart of the number of murders per 100,000 people (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate) Funny thing, you're far more likely to be slaughtered in a Catholic country in Central America, or the Caribbean, or South Africa or... than almost any Muslim country, if it's the slaughtering you're actually worried about. Comparing the murder rate in Brussels to Islamabad is an absurd comparison, maybe compare it to a country with a like level of development and Islamabad is pretty damn safe!
I don't disagree, but people like to point to the a warm and fuzzy Jesus specifically as the example that Christians should model themselves after. They like to point to the Tanakh or Mikra to illustrate how horrible and barbaric the Judeo-Christian God is. They ignore accounts of what the Messiah did in situations such as John 2:15, or what He is going to do in the future... "The master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour he is not aware of. He will cut him to pieces and assign him a place with the hypocrites, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth."
%% And good thing the LORD warned about that.....And actually, muzzies dont just kill Christians + Jews, even though they admit they plan to[Saturday bunch + Sunday bunch]. They trampled 777 of so called pilgrims,[each other] in Mecca.That is a matter of public record.Islamabad sound rightly named. Like Rabbi Daniel Lapin said ,no Christian ever harmed a Jew going to synagog in USA, past 200+years.
%% That is just like saying all markets go up mostly; + ignore the big difference between bull + bear markets.Or like saying since Berrnie Maddoff ran NasdaQ, therfore Nasdaq is a con;-which is false.[Edit= Bernie maddof [Nasdaq] never ripped me off but i use mostly limit, some market orders, NASDAQ..... So i seldom make inacurate broadbrushes.]
But it did start off as a highly confrontational and discriminatory religion. There's no denying historical fact with regards the life of Muhammad. It was confrontational and it still is, perhaps more so, in the fact that its adherents are confrontational and discriminatory. Other religions perhaps are too, but this does not excuse Islam and serves as no contradiction to what I say. Yes, I know the murder rate in Latin America is sky high and these are not Islamic countries, but I did use the words "religiously motivated deaths and the bulk of religiously motivated persecution and oppression" as that's what we're talking about, not street gangs and drug cartels. In addition, I didn't compare the murder rate between Brussels and Islamabad, I compare the likelihood of a religiously motivated death when I visit Brussels, and my clear implication is that this is more likely to be at the hands of an Islamic nut job than a Christian nut job. I thought I was being as clear as possible and using careful and non-inflammatory wording as much as I could so why are you conflating things I've said with things I haven't said?
So we're back to how the religion started off, not how it is today? I just can't keep track! There are nearly 2B Muslims in the world. About 5M of them are Wahhabis, the sect of Muslim that is responsible for the vast majority of religiously driven violence (as opposed to Muslim nations sponsoring violence which is much more of a nation thing than a religion thing). That's .25% of all Muslims who are members of this version of the religion, that by the way is mostly based in Saudi Arabia and so much ignored by the U.S. that you may be learning this for the first time in this thread. So the history of Muhammad actually has almost nothing to do with Muslim religious violence, the history of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab has almost everything to do with it. And brushing 2B with the actions of a 5M person sect is not only wrong but really counterproductive.
Well, you say now you don't want to talk about the origins of the religion and yet you were the one who took exception to my characterisation of the way it started. Alright, I won't mention it again if you don't. But I hope you've made your ruddy mind up on this now. You can juggle with numbers with regards terrorism and yet it doesn't change the fact that Islamic terrorism is responsible for most of the religiously motivated deaths and oppression in the world today. Its also a fact that this terror arises from this religion's belief systems, which are universally characterised, and not just in particular sects, by violent, discriminatory and oppressive codes of conduct. If I am wrong about this, go to Iran, a strongly anti-Wahabbist state, or any such you care to suggest and declare yourself a gay atheist or a trans-gender Catholic or an apostate, see how far you get down that street. However, I do suspect that your introduction of Wahabbism is just a tactic to allow you to shift blame for the aggressive actions of Islamic peoples to the US and to focus myopically on the terror threats to the US. In reality, it is the overall entire religion that is at fault here. Whereas I can't judge one religion against another, all I can see is the actions of their respective adherents, and the actions of Islamic cultures towards "others" is inhuman. Or maybe you see widespread examples of Islamic-taught humaneness, I just don't see them.
Muslims have a book that encourages them to cut off my head. They take that book serious. I really don't need to know anything more about them except their location.