hello,
Putting “some” thought, and putting substantial thought are different things. Its well and good of you to read the Bible and the Koran. It’s not particularly illuminating to read either on their own. Both books are used as blueprints to how one aught to live and those blueprints have been interpreted by the orthodoxy of each religion. Seeing that the various “killings” in the Bible and Koran were death penalties one needs to recognize that both documents are judicial primers. Just as we all can read the Constitution and see in it what we will (the right to keep slaves was once justified by the Constitution until the will to creatively interpret how to disallow slavery was manifest, thank G-d) one needs to look at judicial precedent in order to fully understand the core text.
For the Bible, the interpretive or precedent recording text is called the Talmud. Consider that in the Talmud it is written that a court that exacted a death penalty had a black mark on it for 70 years from that ruling and its judges were diminished in the eyes of the nation. If you were to look at the Haditha (the Koran’s interpretive text) you would find a harshness and cruelty to match the acts of their prophet in the Koran. If you were to look at the nations that consider themselves Islamic, the sort of justice they mete out, the strictness of their code and shallowness of their mercy, you will find a huge discrepancy between the systems.
Which court was the last to sentence someone to stoning? I’ll tell you, it was a court looking to the Haditha for precedent. What courts were the last to sentence a thief to removal of their hand? A Haditha court. What court was the last to execute a homosexual or put a death warrant on the head of a blasphemer? A Haditha court. The last execution enacted by a Jewish court, one that follows the Laws of G-d as brought to us through Moses and interpreted by the Sanhedrin, was over two thousand years ago. Even in those supposedly less sophisticated days the Jews of that time took every opportunity to rationalize how not to kill and how not to maim. The same cannot be said of Muslim courts today.
I argue that you are not engaged enough in your study of religion, history, current events or judicial theory to have a valid argument. Your moral relativism is not based on a thorough education but rather an education of the lowest common denominator. A couple of cultural survey classes provided by agenda driven professors is not an education. Its a grasping in the dark, reaching for a switch so that when the light does come on you might actually begin to learn something.
