Isalm.. so close

What is it that sends islam off course? What seed grows the violence and otherness?

Well, obviously it has something to do with not understanding Christ. And something to do with rewriting the Old and New Testaments to the whisperings of whomever that spirit was.

It probably has most to do with the imperative to submit, and the punishment for not doing so.

This article goes along nicely sans-Christ until the last paragraph (isn't that the usual technique?).

link

Here's the non-Christ thing...

Neither can the Creator be ontologically transformed so as to become the creature, nor can the creature transcend and transfigure itself so as to become in any way or sense the Creator.

No Jesus, no adopted sons of God. OK.. non-Christian.

Judgment, or the consummation of responsibility, is the necessary condition of moral obligation, of moral imperativeness. It flows from the very nature of "normativeness.” It is immaterial whether reckoning takes place in space-time or at the end of it or both, but it must take place. To obey God, that is, to realize His commandments and actualize His pattern, is to achieve falah or success, happiness, and ease. Not to do so, to disobey Him, is to incur punishment, suffering, unhappiness, and the agonies of failure.

Here I suspect the article is alluding to muslim government being OK with meting out God's will.

In America we have legal prosecutors that attempt to perform human justice flawed as it is, in an attempt to keep society from erupting into more chaos.

But add a religious element, where the prosecutors think they have the special knowledge of God's intention in the matter, and it would be a scary thing indeed. This is in fact the scary thing about politicians saying in close statements "God bless America, now let's go to war". We have to stick to the human understanding of Justice, and not adventure into thinking we know God's idea of Justice.

Vengenge is mine says the Lord. Yes, yes, yes.

Anyone who trys to enforce God's Justice, without clearly understanding that they are only enforcing human's faulty idea of justice, is making a mistake. I think American lawmakers generally understand this.

I don't think that understanding is shared by our muslim companions on the journey.