Some interesting ideas here and I'd like to see some thoughts from some of our more noble and pious posters.
(And yes, Christians and Islamaphobes, muslims are worse.
)http://www.rawstory.com/2015/12/how-iro ... extremism/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;Beliefs dictate behavior, and strong belief is a strong dictator. Under the influence of bibliolatry, some Christian parents beat their children to death, convinced they are doing the will of God. Missionaries dedicate their lives to eradicating indigenous cultures and spiritual practices. Priests tell desperate Africans that condoms cause AIDS. And Jihadis behead infidels and stone women they perceive as loose. Each of these appalling violations of universal human values such as kindness and compassion is a case of devout believers simply obeying passages that their religious institutions and traditions have bound between the covers of an immutable book, and then called Holy.
Many Peaceful Believers Practice Bibliolatry
Many modernist Muslims and Christians recognize that their sacred texts are the work of human hands—a record of humanity’s long struggle to understand what is Real and what is Good. These believers knowingly embrace what they find timeless and wise in their received traditions, and treat the rest as a window into history. But in Islam, in particular, this view has been slow to take hold.
Hundreds of millions of moderate Muslims and Christians claim that their sacred texts are perfect and complete without ever confronting what that actually means: that slavery, sexual slavery, torture and genocide can, under the right circumstances, be holy. That women and children are property of men. That the Golden Rule doesn’t apply to nonbelievers. And that blasphemy is a greater sin than killing the blasphemer.
Most Christians and Muslims are decent and kind despite the toxic fragments of Iron Age culture that got bound up in their sacred texts, which sit in multiple copies on the shelves of churches, mosques, schools and homes. They are decent and kind in spite of book worship, not because of it. Many are mercifully oblivious to the cruel prescriptions they carry around in leather bindings.
Given a bit of wiggle room or ambiguity, most people instinctively live in the ways that we must if we want thriving families and prosperous communities–by being reasonably fair and kind and honest and resolving disagreements without violence. Moral intuitions and our cultural hive-mind for the most part trump the unexamined insistence that the Sacred Texts are perfect. Hundreds of millions of believers cherry pick, wisely elevating the best and shunning the worst in their respective traditions, even as they loudly proclaim otherwise, denying their own ability and responsibility to separate the wheat from the chaff. They form spiritual communities around sets of values and practices that overlap with the Iron Age prescriptions of the Quran and Bible only in part.
The High Cost of Having it Both Ways
But the refusal of moderate believers to acknowledge what they subconsciously know—that their sacred texts are incomplete and imperfect—has enormous costs. As long as broad communities of faith continue to endorse the idea that the Quran and Bible are perfect and complete revelations from God, then the Iron Age texts they contain will continue, under the right combination of circumstances, to give rise to the Iron Age behaviors that the texts endorse. Like those of ISIS.
ISIS has Islam wrong. What they do violates Islam. The problem isn’t Islam, but extremism. We’ve all heard the arguments. What the speaker inevitably means is “What they do violates my Islam” or “What they do violates what I see as Islam’s highest ideals.” And from his or her own vantage, the speaker is right. But if moderate Muslims claim that the Quran is beyond criticism, as a package, then they can no more assert that ISIS is a perversion of faith than ISIS can assert the reverse.
Only when people acknowledge some higher ethical principles and empirical standards against which to measure the teachings of our ancestors—and only when we acknowledge that some passages measured against these standards are found wanting—does anyone have a basis for faulting ISIS or Christian Fundamentalists on the grounds that they have gotten Islam or Christianity wrong.
Yeah, slaying people for simple indiscretions = "moving towards a civilized existence." Sinners will burn in hell forever = "moving towards a civilized existence." 
