This is true. I would note that there are Bible verses that make those colonizers look like real fucking assholes, but Christianity was weaponized in those instances. That being said, I can stab someone with a combat knife expressly designed for hurting people, and I can also stab someone with kitchen shears that were produced with no such intent in mind. Christianity isn't nonviolent - it just isn't really optimized for violence and having moved forward from those days, with things like Vatican II, it's much less inclined to use outright thuggery in order to get its way especially when it can get you to talk to it in exchange for some sort of aid or guidance. The modern abortion-clinic bomber types are actually ENORMOUSLY aberrant for the religion, as Christians really rather prefer standing around and guilting the hell out of you for getting an abortion. Christian extremists going after synagogues and mosques with violence is outright freakish to most, especially since evangelical Christians seem to love the hell out of Israel and the Jews. Christianity, for lack of a better way to phrase it, would rather try and sell you on the deal, even if it can be a bit of a shady dealer at times.
The Christian ideology has always been that being Christian makes you holier and better than those who are not Christian, though, so you can't really say it's a pair of kitchen shears when its ideologies make it clear that other people are "lesser" and thus don't matter as much - that kind of rhetoric directly leads to violence.
I really, really dislike the idea that because
some Christians don't endorse the behaviors of extremist Christian terrorists and their ilk, that means Christianity isn't violent. These people are Christians, and they are doing things that Christianity condones - there are churches that condone and encourage this behavior and this hatred, so you can't say that Christians disapprove of it. There are loads of religious leaders in Christianity who openly encourage the murder of gay and lesbian people, something which the Bible itself condones. The Bible also condones murdering women who cheat on their husbands, and many other people for defying tenets of the religion. The Pope himself has confirmed that hundreds and hundreds of nuns have been sexually abused at the hands of church leaders, and we all know how many thousands of young girls and boys have been sexually abused and had the church cover it up.
If this were not approved of in the church they would condemn it. Those pastors and those leaders would no longer be part of Christianity, they would be condemned. But they aren't.
(And before you say it, yes, I know that due to Christianity being so fractured and having many different sects, it is more difficult to condemn and denounce those who preach evil, violent things. But it can still be done. Just because it's hard doesn't mean it isn't worth doing, if you want to show the world that Christianity is not violent and does not commit or encourage or preach atrocities.)
The Christian church and Christian religion is constantly used to justify violence, rape, and murder. The fact that there are religious leaders - pastors, preachers, etc - who agree with this and promote this shows that it is a systemic problem of all of Christianity, not an isolated problem among one or two disturbed individuals acting on their own. If Christianity would like to purge itself of these hateful people, and reinterpret their Bible so as not to promote the murders of innocent people, they are free to do so, but until they do I will continue calling them out for their words, beliefs and actions.
I think you misunderstand the root of the conflict there. It's not about Yahweh, it's about land and a kind of Israeli manifest destiny coupled with abject paranoia. Jews these days don't particularly prefer to predicate wars on religious grounds - they prefer the angle of "defending the ever-surrounded Jewish people and state". There are Muslims that live in Israel, and they are somehow not chased out with pitchforks. The Israelis just have ZERO concept of proportional response doctrine and don't care to learn because they figure someone will just make them look like shit anyway. Ever the persecuted, really, but they're not entirely wrong on that count - it's more a matter of what lumps they did and did not really earn, and the score may be impossible to call accurately without pissing off a LOT of people.
But the Jewish people of Israel also believe that their god gave them that land / intended for them to have that land, which is a massive part of why the conflict exists.
And afaik Muslims in Israel are often treated as second-class citizens - as are African Jewish people, for that matter, which does not reflect well on Israel as a state.
In the modern era? Islam is pretty much the only one still advocating that. No one's totally blameless but Islam got handed a golden opportunity to start looking like pretty nice people in the Ahmadiyya reform sect and right now they do their best to make Ahmadis as miserable as they humanly can. The Christians kind of awkwardly shuffled their feet and put away their swords for the most part, the Jews cling to theirs out of paranoia and exceptionalism (not word filtered, look it up), and the Muslims really, really love swinging theirs around every chance they think they can get.
No one expects it either.
Islam is also a multifaceted religion with more and less peaceful sects, as you specifically mention, just like Christianity and Judaism. There are many Islamic people who are not violent and who do not practice their religion in a violent way or a way that condones or encourages violence. So why don't you make excuses for them the way that you do for Christianity and Judaism? This is where we disagree: I think
all of these religions are wrong. I don't cherry-pick and only go after the "foreign" one while making endless excuses for the others and claiming they're somehow better, so long as we ignore all the terrorism and bigoted murders and whatnot.
What you have to keep in mind when considering the way Islam is presented now is that the entire Middle Eastern region has been destabilized for decades now due to the direct actions of the United States government and other (Christian-based, interestingly) governments -
We overthrew the tolerant and progressive government in Iran and put into power a religious zealot! We did that!
We invaded Iraq and Afghanistan under false pretenses and destroyed their countries and governments!
We opened the door to religious extremism through these actions. We persecute Islam in some countries while allowing religious extremism to flourish in countries that we profit off of a relationship with (Saudi Arabia, for example) and protect those countries from organizations like the UN. The US, led by the Christian right, has had a serious and unforgettable impact on the state of the Middle East. And as many scholars will tell you, issues like political unrest, war, poverty, and so on all lead to increases in religious extremism. So there is that.
The other thing to consider is that, as Westerners (I don't know if you're American but this is especially true to Americans), we only see a biased and extremely negative view of Islam. We are taught and told on the news, in classes, etc. that Islam is a violent and terrible religion, that Muslims are all terrorists, etc. You can see a lot of that kind of ignorant, one-sided stereotyping on this post and hell, on this entire forum. The picture we are shown of Islam through our right-wing media and the word-of-mouth of bigots is not the complete picture of Islam. It is a biased picture intended to make us hate Muslim people and fear their religion.
I don't believe it's as simple as "Islam bad, Christianity/Judaism good". All Abrahamic religions endorse violence and do violence onto others. The only reason you all think that Islam is somehow worse, or that Christianity and Judaism are somehow better, is because the latter have better PR and are (primarily) centered in wealthy, Western countries where the conditions for widespread social unrest and religious extremism don't currently exist - though rates of religious extremism in the US and Europe are on the rise.
All Abrahamic religions should be held accountable for their violence, their words, their beliefs and actions. All Abrahamic religions should be stripped of their societal and governmental power. Not just the one that happens to be mostly brown people (and don't think this has nothing to do with it, it has everything to do with why Islam is singled out).
