I don't speak for David, but I'll comment & ask a couple of questions too.

Here were yours:

1. Do you believe Islam is a religion of peace? In that they believe that live and let live?

2.Do you believe Christianity is as radical as Islam?

Pat, I think you are making the classic "category" mistake by taking an idea and letting individual proponents stand in for the overall.

What I mean is, enormous ideas like "Islam" (an umbrella that covers divergent branches or forms of the faith like Shi'a, Sunni, Sufism, and Ibadism) as well as "Christianity" (an umbrella that covers everything from . . . well, read this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity#Branches_of_Christianity_in_the_present_day) . . . both of those ideas are so broadly open to interpretation, that it would take a month of sundays to broach the topic of how individual faiths differ within a given religious tradition, and then we'd be on to the seven months of sundays it would take to tease out all the differences between various regions, congregations, home study groups, and individuals.

It might be quicker to sort humanity by other means. There are those who are likely to excuse killing other human beings for reasons of faith, and those who are . . . less likely to see that as their motivation.

No religion, no community of any size, is free of either type.

Your second question "Do you believe Christianity is as radical as Islam?" is a pretty tough set of ideas to nail down, framed in the form of a question whose problems can be illustrated by analogy.

For example: Do you believe that apples are as sweet as pears? We could make that comparison, but we would first have to come to some agreement as to what the terms mean. In the case of sweetness, I do believe the science team has the numbers on that one . . . and now we're just down to the question of individual types of apples vs. individual types of pears. (This week, Red Delicious vs. Bartlett!) Oh, and we'd also have to set a peak fructifying moment that somehow would make the comparison meaningful, as the sugars will be at higher or lower points depending upon the moment in the growing season . . .

Which is more to the point than it may seem: Any given believer in any given system is possibly a "radical." It kind of depends at what moment in his/her "season" you catch him/her. If you catch a person at a young, impressionable age, it's easy to "sweeten" the fruit (a terrible analogy for what I really mean, which is: make the person ready to kill someone who is not like him/her in some way.)

But the concept of "more radical" is difficult to nail down with regard to individuals, and much more so with regard to large, complex societies.

Which brings me back to the word you wanted to point out, the word "believe." I'll trust that you understand that there is at least a potential difference between "knowing" and "believing," and I'll ask you a couple of questions:

1. Do you KNOW that ALL followers of Islam (self-professed) are more radical than ALL followers of Christ (again, self-professed)? 2. Do you KNOW that NO follower of Christ (self-professed) is capable of horrific acts of terrorism? (Timothy McVeigh might be a place to start.) 3. Do you BELIEVE that "Christianity" has practiced a doctrine of "live and let live" with regards to the Islamic world? 4. Have you GOT any more of those REM soundboard recordings that one could avail you of?

Herring405