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Originally Posted by ChainLegacy
Okay, but you're not really making any effort to dispute the point I brought up about conquest and Muhammad. 'That's all there is to it' works when a parent scolds his child for misbehaving, not in an academic style discussion.
You read my post, so you should know that I don't think the presence of extremists in and of itself is any reason to conclude the religion has 'natural violent tendencies.' My point was it might be easier to justify your violent actions when you look at something like Muhammad conquering Mecca as your inspiration when compared to, say, Christianity, where Jesus never conquered anything.
Yes. My idea was that perhaps Islam, as a religion, makes it easier to justify violent resistance. NOT that Islam is inherently violent, not that it's evil, but that IF one wanted to justify their violent actions, it seems to me to be easier to point directly to concepts like Jihad and the conquest of Mecca to gather inspiration. You can definitely still do it with Christianity or Buddhism, but you've got to be a bit more roundabout in doing so.
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I didn't address the whole origin thing because that is not relevant. Regardless of how christianity came to be, there still were violent crusades done in its name, which was instrumental in soldifying christianity's hold over Europe. While Islam spread mostly peacefully world wide, with historical forced-conversion efforts being all localized affair. Saying Islam makes it easier to justify violent resistance is the same as saying it is inherently violent, since in the end people can bend pretty much everything to suit their interests in times and places. What about Reconquista then ? It succeeded after all. How is Islam any more practical as violent resistant ideology then christianity ? It's never about canonical tenets, which parts of you can always modify or ignore to suit your interests. It's about the human factor and the situation they're in, in other words, how people utilize and organize any resource at their disposal to meet the challenges they're facing.