Glad to see this interesting discussion staying sane for the most part. Lot of good points are being made, until people start defending a religion (islam, hinduism, christinity).
The key trap we are all falling into is - to bring faith (of any religion) into a reason based argument.
Back when religions were invented, we did not have much law and order. People with leadership skills(Mohammed,Valmiki/Vyasa, Moses) identified this issue and addressed it by giving some guidelines and using a supernatural force(God, Allah etc) to enforce those guidelines. They did not have police back then.
In later days, more leaders emerged and started ammending some of these to address few issues with judgement of their predecessors (all of them made mistakes, no point arguing which religion made fewer, ex: sati-hinduism, most of shariat law-islam, what happened to galileo-catholicism).
The reason why these changes were allowed, is because of tolerance of questioning faith based arguments. Hinduism or Christianity evolved to allow that self-correction mechanism. It seems to me that islam, significantly slowed down that negative-feedback process. I am not blaming any faith here, I am just making an observation. Salman Rushdie(Satanic Verses) and Ranganayakamma(Vishavruksham) are two of few examples that I used to draw that conclusion.
We realize that not all muslims are terrorists. But Ismail bhai, what we would like to see, is educated muslims like you, willing to respectfully
