[mburbank]

Last I checked, all major world religious texts had some very nice tolerant stuff and some really nasty violent stuff in them.

Last I checked, every major world religion had done some very nice stuff like helping poor people and sick people and some very ugly stuff like killing all sorts of people.

Last I checked no world religous text was always interpretted by it's followers as inherently violent to outsiders or inherently tolerant of outsiders.

Last I checked, various groups of practitioners of each of the worlds religions had serious disagreements about what their religous texts meant.

The Pope during the Inquisition certainly managed to find much scriptural support for burning tons of people to death.

Many American Christians today find justification for thinking homosexuality sinful in Leviticus, while ignoring that Leviticus also intructs you to disasemble your house if their is mildew. Many American Christians believe that Jesus's new covenant meant God no longer cared if they kept Kosher as the old testament intructs, but feel that Jesus's new covenenat DID NOT mean to stop thinking homosexuality was a sin.

That's the thing about these major religous texts. They're complicated. People devote entire liftetimes to their study. Don't be so quick to dismiss the Koran or Islam. You want to make a case against extremist fundamentalists? Good. Me too. But if you think only Islam has them, you'd be wrong, and if you think this moment in history tells you something about Islam that it hasn't already told you about every other religion... well, you're just a little bit stupid, aren't you?