"Once again, nothing in Christian scripture compels Christians to fight other faiths. On contrast, Koran does so compel its followers. That's the fundamental asymmetry.."
It doesn't matter. There are about 1.3 billion muslims in the world and the fraction causing problems in practice is minimal however you try and spin it.
Groups like the LRA and many other African Christian groups, Mexican cartels justifying their actions using Christianity and so on and so forth could make ISIS look tame with the amount of people they've killed and the manner in which they've killed them. ISIS beheads a single Westerner and it's headline news, a Mexican drug cartel beheads 40 people and you've really got to fucking dig to find any news on it.
"IRA's fight was purely secular â" nothing in Catholicism insists nor mandates the sort of things they've done."
How old are you 10? Were you even around when the troubles in Ireland were at their worst? I just don't understand how else someone can be this fucking ignorant. You're so utterly oblivious to what the Irish troubles were really about that you think the IRA's fight is secular? You really don't know about the whole Catholics vs. Protestants thing? How can you even begin to join a discussion like this when you're so profoundly lacking a clue on it?
"Muslims, once again, must fight other religions â" in order to remain good Muslims. Because Koran â" which they believe to be the word of God verbatim â" says so."
The Bible says an awful lot of things that aren't particularly nice either, but guess what? most Muslims like most Christians have learnt that some of what these texts say are plain fucking stupid and opt not to pursue them. This is why we're finally starting to see women bishops in the UK as but one example - because it turns out that although the bible preaches misogyny it's not actually cool in this day and age. We hear about Islamic fundamentalism more in the West because it's currently the biggest threat, 30 years ago in the UK though it was the IRA, a wholly Christian conflict.
You can try and justify this how you want but you'd still be wrong. South and Central Africa is ravaged by Christian fighting but the focus is wholly on the Middle East/North Africa because the West has largely given up on the West of Africa and the middle east is where we're primarily trying to interfere nowadays.
It seems that there are violent thugs from every walk of life and the proportion seems similar whatever they purport their cause to be. Whether it's leftist guerillas in South America, Mexican drug cartels in Central America, Far right fascists in Northern and Eastern Europe, Russian Orthodox imperialists in Russia and surrounding states, Christian fundamentalists in Europe and Africa, Islamic fundamentalists in the middle east, Buddhist fundamentalists in Burma, or whatever else- bad people find reasons to kill, pretending that one group of bad people is somehow worse than another is stupid. There's not even really a metric by which the worst of the worst, ISIS or Al Qaeda can compare to the Mexican drug cartels in terms of amount of kills and level of violence - groups like La Familia and Knights Templar cartels claim religion as being key parts of their foundations just as ISIS do, so you cannot simply claim one is secular whilst the other is not.
What about individual acts of terrorism in the West? Well in recent years Anders Breivik killed more kids in the name of Christianity in Norway than the Ottawa shootings, the current Sydney situation, the London 7/7 bombings, and a few French anti-semitic incidents combined. 9/11? small fry. Want to know what real horror sounds like? Try the Srebrenica massacre of 1995 where Russian backed Serbian Orthodox fighters thought it would be fun to kill roughly 10,000 muslims in a single massacre often using things such as hammers to beat them to death so as not to waste bullets and then dumping them all in mass graves.
So you can say things like "the IRA is secular" or whatever all you like which is complete nonsense, but what you really mean is that you have a very specific hatred of a certain group of people. I even understand that, and understand and sympathise with why - they're targetting us because we're targetting them so it feels like they're the only bad guys in the world if all you have is a very ethnocentric western view of the world as you clearly do, but don't try and dress it up as anything else.
The number of Christians and Muslims in the world is absolutely staggering, 1.2bn - 1.5bn is a big number. People often have trouble with big numbers, and if you're one of those people as you seem to be, then take it from me, the number of actual muslims engaging in violence out of the more than a billion people who identify with muslims is as much a drop in the ocean as the number of Christians doing the same.
Most conflicts have some religious twist to them, you can dispute whether religion is the reason, or the excuse for such conflicts, but cherry picking one conflict and claiming it's the reason and then for the others saying it's just the excuse and they're not really adherents? That's nonsense and smacks of just being an excuse to persecute and attack one specific group over another equally bad group making you as bad as anyone that merely preaches jihad on Twitter or whatever, because it's the exact same twisted bitter logic and justification for division that you're using.
