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Christians aren't as violent about other people stomping on their religious views? I have 5 words for you:

The Crusades, and The Inquisition.

The thing is, all that is way in the past for them. They were violent @$$holes, and they've gotten over it (for the most part). The only thing Christians want to go to war with these days is birth control, and they're mostly just shouting ♥♥♥♥ and staring meanly, for the most part, and mostly it's aimed at themselves, not anyone else.

Now, Christianity has had time to mellow out about this a bit, but Islam has not, being a younger religion, so it's almost understandable. The worst of all this is that while Judaism has had plenty of time, more than even the Christians, they seem to have missed learning that lesson somehow, and still like to blow up everyone that doesn't like them. Seriously, Israel, all of this, from Palestine to ISIS, is ♥♥♥♥ and you know it. Grow up. lrn2peace Sheesh. But I digress. There are childish ways of responding to things, like someone hit you, so you hit them back, and there are grown up ways, like using your words, listening, and compromise. Clearly lots of people are interested in being childish about everything, so they suicide bomb something, shoot up a magazine office, or carpet bomb Hamas. I really wish people would just grow up. [/harsh]

Why are you generalizing an entire religion

I'm with Emelia. The sentence "that was kind of ignorant, Doram" is never one I thought would pass my lips, but to go from "stereotyping the Christian and Muslim faiths as violent is awful" to "the Jews, on the other hand" is not sitting comfy with me. The Palestinian conflict seems like political turmoil by people on the area, not a worldwide Jewish issue

Um. Guys, seriously, what the ♥♥♥♥?

When did it become okay for us to start labelling entire groups of people?

I don't care whether you're doing it on a religious basis or not, but it's definitely not okay. The entire last page or two of this thread are really kind of offensive to me, and I'm not religious, either. You can't just say that "All X think Y." Even if you're stereotyping/targeting your own religion, it's still not okay at all.

ISIS/Palestine/the Charlie Hebdo shooters/etc do not represent all Muslims.
The government of Israel does not represent all Jews. (Really, Doram?)
The Westboro Baptist Church/radical Christian activists/etc do not represent all Christians.

These names are familiar because they are often very LOUD about their beliefs, be it in the form of terrorism, hate speech, or something else; however, please recognize that they are only tiny subsets of much, MUCH larger groups of people, on the order of millions and billions. Christianity has about 2.2 billion adherents, Judaism about 14 million, and Islam about 1.8 million. The majority of all of these are just ordinary people trying to go on with their lives. They aren't all extremists, they aren't all violent, they aren't all terrorists, they aren't all easily offended, they aren't all irrational, they aren't all fundamentalists, they don't even all entirely agree with their own religion. Nobody can or should be lumped into groups that all "think the same way," or "act the same way," or "are all the same." (Looking at you, Shroom.) That applies to the past, too; I'm sure not all Christians were supporters of the Crusades or the Inquisition at the time. Just as they aren't all supporters of the extremist groups today are, and just as not all Muslims are supporters of ISIS or the Charlie Hebdo attack, and just as not all Jews are supporters of Israel/what have you. Please, just stop saying "All X are Y" and "All X think/believe that Y."

Several of you just lost a lot of respect from me.

All X don't necessarily are Y, but all X form a group with the more-or-less common properties of Y. I'm not talking about the individual, I'm talking about the mass, I'm talking about the big picture. And the Islam has a bellicose touch from its origin till today - starting with Mohammed, who was a prophet at first, then a political leader, then a commander and a warrior against the followers of the arabic polytheism who didn't want to accept his prophethood. This militant touch is surely not the cause for the existence of religious terrorism, but it seems to be a cause for the excessive, disproportional extent of terrorism in the name of Islam. Of course Islam doesn't take up the cause of terrorism, but maybe young Muslims can be radicalized more easily because they've grown up with the self-conception of the Islam to be the "only right religion" of some sort and all the phrases of Koran saying "all disbeliefers will go to hell". Most young Muslims learn about good Koran exegesis and not to understand these phrases literally, but a few don't. And even reasonable individuals occasionally are going astray and land in the abysm of extremism.

The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has far-reaching historic causes, but from the distance it looks like a pointless, ridiculous spiral of violence, bringing no solution but innocent people suffering. It's a problem of both sides as far as I know. However, it has nothing to do with what we're talking about.

This topic is going about as well as imagined

In defense of Doram, his observation about Christianity and its closest branches(Catholicism, Protestant, Orthodox) is pretty valid if you take into account, for example, that these were what spread the most. They were the religions of all the expansive, imperial countries. Throw some people far away from home (maybe a different giant landmass) for a few decades or *cough* three centuries, and I think it's pretty likely that beliefs will morph at least a little bit with the evolving, expanding countries. Democracy and Freedom, aka the US, had to have changed the grand scheme of these religions some substantial amount.

Judaism and Islam on the other hand, I can't really speak for, but I can at least suggest that the reason the two religions -- at least in the Middle East -- are so focused on one another is because they haven't really expanded like Christianity. Yes, there are Jewish minorities throughout the western world, but about half of their population are Israelis. Yes, Islam sorta spread into Northern Africa, but the same desert setting and proximity to most of these religions' origin doesn't really allow for much change in my eyes.

So what are they left with? Some neighbors that don't share their ideas, and no place to expand their ideas, lest they want to move into even more arid desert or invade an already-settled area to force ideas. Their focus unfortunately seems to have been on the latter for the past few centuries, hidden to us by all the other happenings in the world.

No, the two entire religions are not at odds with each other. That much is clear in the US alone. My community in particular has several Muslims and Jews. The Middle-eastern region is just unstable, and sometimes a few extremists make their way on a plane and land somewhere radically different, or an idea escapes and lands in the brain of someone that is maybe desperate for an idea to adopt.

Just my 30-minute thoughts being written down. I don't think Doram was trying to label entire groups of people, but language is tricky and he probably just missed an important word or was caught up in the moment.

Ok, I will admit that I was having a bad day, and previous to that was just on the receiving end of some of the very bs we have been discussing here, but replace <insert religion here> with a moderating "all the violent people that like to use religion as an excuse for bad behavior in <insert religion here>", and my points pretty much stand. Frankly, I AM getting pretty sick of people deciding that justice for even the slightest of offenses needs to happen at the end of either a gun or a bomb. So, I beg forgiveness for my nasty rant. If there's one thing I hate, it's violence, and as oxymoronic as that is, it runs pretty deep in me. Sorry.

In all honesty, I have no problem respecting the wishes of other religions, as long as they are about what those religions are doing with themselves. Once those religions start pressing those beliefs onto other people, it is instantly not OK, be it random Mormons trying to convert people, radical Christians trying to legislate abortion and birth control out of existence, or radical and insanely violent Muslims killing people over comics. And yes, it is absolutely not the major religions to blame, but as has been mentioned, the loudmouthed ones seem to be the ones misbehaving the most, and furthermore, the loudmouthed and ill behaved ones ARE acting on bits and pieces that do exist in those religions, whether the majority acknowledge or follow it or not. Read the Old Testament. Yaweh was a real ♥♥♥♥. I'm not making this stuff up. Yes, the vast majority of these religions are fine upstanding citizens, but by the same token, I don't see lots of Muslims getting out there and publicly denouncing these people as crazy any more than I see it happen in any other religion. Crazy, violent people are crazy, and violent, and need to be called such, and then bloody well get them some help. The first step in solving a problem is admitting that there is one.

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EDIT: And as for the stuff going on in Israel, read up on it. Read the actual things they have been talking about in these "Peace Talks". Read all about the politics and culture of the difficulty over there. This all boils down to the fact that the Jews say that it is THEIR Holy City, and the Muslims say that it's THEIR Holy City, (and the Christians-who-have-decided-to-back-off say that it is their Holy City but-you-guys-can-fight-over-it-if-you-want-to), and considering how many times the city has been conquered and reconquered and conquered back, and how many of their holy people did big stuff there, THEY ARE ALL CORRECT, and worst of all, there is this thousands of years old feud, that at this point boils down to childish pettiness, amounting to the fact that this somehow means that they each want everyone else to GO AWAY and leave them ALONE to revel in THEIR Holy City, so get out. No seriously, get out. No, I now have a gun to your head. Get out. Ok, I'm going to start bombing your cities and killing people. IT'S MY CITY. WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! This is not an ignorant opinion. If anything, I'm disgusted with how much I HAVE read about this from a great many sources, including talking to people who have lived and/or visited there (and moved here to get away from it).

Again, the religions are not to blame, just what people are doing in that religion's name. The problem is when there are LARGE numbers of people doing really horrible stuff. And yes, any random Jewish person in Israel, might not want to pick up a gun and personally go shoot a Palestinian, but at the very least they will say that the Palestinians do not belong there, and enough of that base sentiment buoys the violent ones into thinking that they are justified, and it is actually that widely-held-yet-mild belief that provides a platform from which the extremists to do a really great high-dive and make a remarkable splash. And the same goes for the Palestinians. Part of my point is that the problem is not just the extremely violent ones, but the mildly violent and widely held opinions that run underneath, that are ignored, explained away, or otherwise hidden, but still exist, and do nothing more than provide fertile ground for these types of things to keep happening. Until people can seriously A) admit this stuff is there, B) stop letting it make decisions for them at all levels of action from government to terrorist, and C) find some other way to deal with things other than violence, there will not be peace in Israel.

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EDIT2:
And this will be the last bit that I add - There IS a kind of problem with the religions themselves, too, but it is equally subtle and insidious. Part of the reason all of that stuff I mentioned is running around in mild and relentless ways underneath all of this, is the fact that even the most reasonable of the religious have a problem with saying that their Holy Book is WRONG (with a capital WRONG) sometimes. In the Bible, in the Old Testament, which was the Jewish section of the book, which all later religions (Christianity and Islam) consider valid Holy Text, has detailed information for how much to charge for a slave, the exact process for selling your under-age daughter, and exactly what kind of beating or otherwise you can deliver to your wife if she becomes unfaithful. It's in there, and it's in there more than once. And there's nasty bits in the New Testament, and the Qur'an as well. Until every single last one of us, of whatever religion we follow, can look at such "holy texts" and say, well, that part is wrong - DO NOT LISTEN TO IT, DO NOT DO IT, IT IS COMPLETELY WRONG - and then actually contemplate whether it needs to be pulled out of active use materials, WITHOUT HESITATION OR RESERVATION, we will not be able to truly root out all of this violence, because the crazies are doing nothing more than pointing at these passages and saying "Hey, our Holy Book is perfect and untouchable, and it pretty much says kill all infidels. What am I supposed to do?" Their craziness is being SUPPORTED by everyone else's willingness to ignore these sections, while still calling the whole thing perfect and untouchable. And that goes for all three Abrahamic religions at the very least. Let's be honest, real, and think with our 21^st century minds about all of this stuff, have a full on conversation about it, and bloody well DO SOMETHING to fix it. And there's an out here, people. It may have been divinely inspired, but it was human hands that wrote it, and humans can make mistakes. Let's decide to stop making those same mistakes over and over.

♥♥♥♥, we blame the religion, but let's look at the idiots. Doram is right. How many people can you name right off your brain who have said to nuke the middle east or send all Muslims to concentration camps?

Topic changed from Charlie Hebdo to giant discussions about Religions overall and the extremists that kill in his/her religion's name.

All in four pages.



But in all seriousness, has any country even done anything about extremists in general?