Roger,

Your whole argument turns on the question of whether it is a LOGICAL POSSIBILITY to be a moderate, faithful Muslim, and you seem to think the answer is NO.

I suggest that you closely examine all the other major creeds of the world, and put the same question to yourself about their so-called followers. If you do so honestly, in varying degrees you will find the exact same answer that you have found about Muslims. But here’s the real problem: who defines the pious Jew? It appears that in your mind it is you who defines the pious Jew. Your job is to examine the sacred texts and then announce a verdict about what it means to be an adherent. So, you want to be a high priest of the texts — am I wrong?

There are many problems inherent in sacred texts, although you will not find a militaristic tradition in the Buddhist version of humanity’s attempts for spiritual nourishment. But these problems with the ancients can be overcome, as evidenced by the vast majority of Jews, Hindus, Christians, Muslims and even Buddhists who clearly don’t follow all the strange tenets laid down in their diverse religious code. The plethora of unambiguously harmful commands apparent to the extremists is simply not there for earnest seekers, because most people seek knowledge, even in sacred texts, by employing a humane capacity of reason. The majority of the religious who end up guiding and developing the mainstream of their faith traditions recognize that attempting to live literally by every word of the text is impossible. So they tend to seek a truly fundamental, sparse and simple law: Worship God and respect your fellows. Then they go on to act in ways that both reflect and refine the best parts of their traditions. They’re not looking for prompts to slaughter and mistreat, they’re looking for practical guides to live in a wholesome and happy way. Islam, like any other long-established and well-nourished religious faith, provides this amply.

But you seem to think that there is something exceptionally inhuman and unabsolvable about the Islamic texts. And yet this is clearly untrue, as nearly 1400 years of history and over a billion Muslims attest. Contrary to some popular opinions of the stupidest and most hateful variety, Islam cannot be an inherently destructive and oppressive death-cult or an isolationist refuge for the utter fringes. If it were, it would have died in some lunatic’s cave after a few generations. Islam is certainly, in actual reality, a powerfully instructive and globally successful human belief system whose so-called irreconcilable elements have been repeatedly shown to be reconcilable, functional, productive, tolerant and humane. That is the long Islamic tradition that actually rules the lives of living-breathing Muslim people, just your average normal people, following, according to their own mouths, the ancient tenets of Islam.

The ugliness is cultural baggage that will be managed with the right attitude. Or have you forgotten that just a few generations ago we had (and still have, right there in the text) clear-cut Biblical justifications for slavery, which were extensively and authoritatively quoted in the mainstream of our Christian cultural discourse?

If you want to have a say in the Islamic cultural discourse of the present day, why don’t you stop being helpful to extremists maniacs who read the texts the same way Gert Wilders seems to be reading them.