Zealotry and violence

One of the erroneous statements I've been hearing a lot recently is that all religious extremists are equally dangerous. This has been advanced, like all ideas are advanced, for a variety of reasons, but primary among them is an effort to form some level of equivalency between religions.

This is ludicrous.

Try to find me the extremist Wiccan who adheres so firmly to the notion of "First, do no harm" that they become a danger to themselves and others. Or consider the Amish, those powderkegs of Christianity, ready to go and raise a barn at a moment's notice.

No, the simple fact is that all religions... a religion being nothing more and nothing less than a set of rules by which to demonstrate adherance to a faith... can be dangerous in different degrees, based on the rules set forth. Catholics were able to find enough in the Bible to advocate for the Inquisitions; Muslims can find things in the Koran to justify nearly any atrocity, and have been doing so for over a thousand years.

The answer isn't simply a refutation of faith, either. The largest mass slaughters in history have been performed by secular states upon their own populations, whether in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, or elsewhere.

The Muslim religion is, simply, the most aggressive and violent of all major contemporary religions. While, thankfully, it does speak heavily about peace in some ways, it also stipulates that the rules which apply between Muslims do not apply to non-Muslims. It also advocates war against non-Muslims. Thankfully, many Western Muslims have rejected the literal interpretations of many of those passages, and instead interpret them as being allegorical or symbolic; disturbingly, the Koran also specifies that it is acceptable to deceive even fellow Muslims if it is for the purpose of waging war against the infidels.
This makes it particularly difficult for outsiders to be fully welcoming to Muslims, because any reading on the subject, or simply paying attention to the statements made by high-profile clerics, shows the danger involved. And it is also grossly unfair to the Western Muslims who are trying to peacefully advance their religion, because they are being judged by the actions of others.

I am perfectly happy to admit that the Christians have had their major problems in the past, and that some of them continue to this day. Whenever you have a doctor murdered because he has performed abortions, or a gay couple kicked to death for the simply offense of holding hands in public, the notion that Christians are free of guilt is thrown out the window.

But, please, enough with the foolish attempts at equality. If I drive my car to the corner store, or I drive my car back and forth across the country five times, yes, technically they're both drives; but they are not equivalent. The anti-homosexual chanting of thirty lunatics at a military funeral is not the same as international calls for tracking down and murdering cartoonists. Boycotting and holding small demonstrations against a movie viewed as blasphemous is not the same as wedging a butcher's knife hilt-deep in the chest of a movie director who creates a film about the need for better treatment of Muslim women. Ideally, violence wouldn't be a part of either religion, but to claim they are the same in the measure of that violence is stupidity of the highest order.