Let me start with saying that in my opinion there is no monotheistic religion that can be peaceful in the most literal meaning of the word. Now let me explain that because the statement I just made can seem to be a little arrogant. A monotheistic religion is a religion that worships one god and one god only. That is one of the most important parts of such religions. If you are gonna look into the holy scriptures of monotheistic religions like Islam, Christianity, Judaism etc, you will find that in all of these scriptures like the bible, the Quran or the Torah there are certain rules that provide heavy punishment, violence or even death penalty when you worship one or multiple god's other than described in the holy scripture of that religion.
Besides the fact you can't believe in another god according to the view of these religions, you can't also have any kind of relationship with anyone who has faith in another god from another religion because in the eyes of, for instance Islam, someone who practice Christianity is a non-believer that follows the wrong set of rules of a wrong religion and is the enemy. The enemy that is not willing to convert to Islam should be punished, violently tortured or even put to death when despite this all, he would not change his beliefs.
I don't know how you feel about this but that is not my vision of peace at all, and I hope that it's not yours either!
Who or What is to Blame?
It's fair to mention that the majority of believers of these religions are a bunch of cherry pickers (let's be grateful for that) that only pick out the “good” stuff of their religion and the rules that come with it and ignore the violent parts. They are just regular, good people who live in society, raising their children, having day jobs and (normal) dreams or goals they wish to achieve.
Nonetheless, to everyone's regret you also have the smaller group of people who can be called “extremists”. They form the smallest part of this group of believers, (mostly Muslims it seems) but must not be ignored. And that is just what the problem is according to what I think personally. “The ignorance”.
In a time where extremists and terrorists are more likely to actually stand up and fight for their beliefs they want to force upon the world, rather than to have a fair discussion about it. We should not be ignorant to the cause of these problems. And by “we” I mean literally everyone from atheists to agnostics to religious (cherry picking) people. When another terrorist attacks somewhere in the world in the name of Allah, (cherry picking) Muslims tend to react very defensively and start to shout out loud that, “these extremists that took these actions are not Muslims”. That, “you can not murder in the name of Allah”. That “they do not take actions out of religious but rather out of political reasons”. And I feel these people in the sense that it is horrible to them when people start to generalize regular “every-day Muslims” with extremists. But at the same time they should not try to get rid of this problem only by putting the responsibility somewhere on external factors other than religion but they should be willing to have a critical view to these religions too. It's too easy to say the problem lies elsewhere.
Counter Arguments.
1. To counter the - “these extremists that took these actions are not Muslims” - argument:
Yes, they are in fact Muslims. Maybe not in the exact same way as the majority of Muslims are practising their religion but nonetheless they are Muslims that read the same holy scriptures as every Muslim does and get inspired (unfortunately) by the verses and lines that cherry picking believers (thank “god”) are ignoring. In other words, they take the words of that holy book literal and go back to the fundamentals.
2. To counter the - “you can not murder in the name of Allah” argument:
Actually the counter-argument above has already countered this argument too. There are lots of verses and lines that say you can kill in the name of Allah. I will not add up these verses here for I think they are known by most people now by repeating it over and over in endless debates everywhere.
3. To counter the - “they do not take actions out of religious but rather out of political reasons” argument:
Well this is an argument I can partly agree on because in every religion there is a portion of politics implemented into the belief system. Just like we have regular politics there are also religious politics like the “sharia” which is a set of rules made by god who (so the story tells us) passed it on to the founders of that religion. So when what they want to say with their argument is that the extremists use the political rules from their religion to fight our (non-believing) nations in the goal to carry it out all over the globe, they are right.
To end this text I would like to say that I hope that all people one day can look into the mirror and say proudly that they were not ignorant and were not denying the problem. That they did not lack critical view and searched for all the possible causes and solutions of the problems that were there. That we can open our eyes every morning knowing that troubles are there in the world, for a perfect world without troubles is not realistic, but that we know we can overcome these problems by using our knowledge and human morality that we did not necessarily need a god for.
“Amen”.
