The point of the discussion, in my opinion, isn't broad generalities about war and peace, religion and atheism, but whether there is something irreduceable about Islam that promotes religiously motivated violent conflict.
Of course, it's Politically Incorrect to mouth anything but platitudes about how "everybody is the same under the skin" (mostly true) and therefore "every religion has its virtues and failings" (mostly true) and therefore "Islam is the religion of peace" (not true) and "jihad means inner struggle" (so misleading as to be false, for purposes of this discussion).
The PC-ness gets so fatuous that recently I heard an Islamic scholar sputtering that "only one tenth of one percent" of Muslims believe in jihad as conquest by the sword. I wish he hadn't been on the radio, I would have liked to have asked him personally, for example, about the Islamic Revolution in Iran under the Ayatollah Khomeini and now, and the Taliban, and their support for jihad by the sword in other countries, and the support in other countries for them. A sizeable number of Muslims support this concept, perhaps ten percent more or less actively, and another 30 percent sympathize (one estimate). Ten percent of a billion and a half is a lot of people.
But for some reason, the people who are satisfied with the argument that "Islam is the religion of peace" and "jihad means inner struggle" never actually bother to check by reading the Koran and commentary by actual Muslims living in Muslim countries, they latch on to things said by Westerners who are sympathetic to Islam. |
