But one of the reasons I would like to participate in interfaith discussion is because I feel that one of the biggest crimes in history is violence in the name of religion.
Did you have any examples for us in particular? Which of the Crusades should we discuss?
This particular thread jumped out at me because I think it hits on such a central issue of why dialogue is needed.
Avi1223,
You're probably not naive. But it's possible you haven't looked around this forum. This same topic comes up every other day and for some reason it never goes anywhere.
I suspect there is no closure because discussants limit their analysis to assumptions, conjecture, and remote inferences. When presented with facts, they ignore them and go start another thread that invariably will have the exact same problems as the other one.
There is a study that shows that people with a right wing mind set are actually not interested in new information. In effect, they are doomed to perpetuate their ignorance.
The lack of intellectual curiosity would explain the obsessive preoccupation with simplistic talking points, the primitive, repetitive, sloganeering quality of their discourse, the tendency to see the world in black/white terms, and the undue focus on emotional overtones (fear, resentment, conflict, malice, etc) to the exclusion of relevant facts.
Do you ever get the feeling that a big part of the reason that there is so much violence in the Middle East, or wherever there is significant Muslim population, is because violence is inculcated so much in the Holy Koran and Hadith?
Not really. If you recall, the Koran includes a major contribution to war ethics, i.e., the protection of noncombatants. A thousand years after the Koran, European cultures were still killing indiscriminately. "Kill them all. G-d will sort them out."
But good opener for another of the Same-Old-Same-Old kind of thread that, as usual, will go nowhere. But we have to waste our time somehow....