I am writing this as I return from a seminar at Oxford University on the threat posed by terrorism today. Forty individuals from many different disciplines and a diversity of nations and cultures convened for a week to present their current research on this topic. Immediately a difference of opinion surfaced between those who felt passionately that Islam was significantly and essentially more violent than any other world religion and those who adamantly rejected this claim. I was struck by this because only a few weeks earlier, at a conference on religion and violence at a major Midwestern University, a very bright guy confronted me quite directly on exactly the same issue.

As someone who has taught world religions for several decades, it seems uncontestable that every world religion has sponsored horrific acts of violence and inhumanity (and the same religions have also sponsored heroic acts of self-sacrifice and humanity). To take one obvious example: this discussion would look very different if it was occurring in Europe and the Middle East in the Middle Ages. Then Moslems, Christians and Jews lived peacefully together in many Moslem controlled countries and Christians were busy butchering Moslems, Jews, and other Christians in the crusades. Taken in terms of their entire histories and full manifestations, no religion can claim to be completely a religion of peace and no religion can be castigated as simply a religion of violence. A comparative study of violent religious groups reveals many common themes in such groups across traditions. Often they share more in common with each other than they share with more mainstream elements of their own traditions [many examples can be found in my book Blood That Cries Out From the Earth: The Psychology of Religious Terrorism (Oxford, 2008)].