Silversoul said:

I think it's a mistake to reduce a religion to a set of beliefs.  I think it's more like a language that provides an interpretive framework in which to find one's own path.

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nice

i know very little about islam, though i read a bit of a sufi text in a library once and found the similarities to buddhism were very apparent. from what i've heard/read of sufiism, it seems like a very interesting path

Silversoul said:

That said, I think there is a lot of beauty in Islam, and I honor all world religions as legitimate paths to the sacred.  There is also, as has already been pointed out, a lot of diversity in Islam, so broad generalizations tend to obscure a lot of the subtle nuances that exist.  Even in a place like Iran, there are some very progressive clerics who support women's rights and other liberal democratic ideas familiar to us in the West.  I think it's a mistake to reduce a religion to a set of beliefs.  I think it's more like a language that provides an interpretive framework in which to find one's own path.

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Yeah I agree with this entirely. The problem is people stop walking the path and start worshipping the sign post...Its human interpretation of the framework not the framework itself that leads to what we would deem negative/positive consequences. There are undoubtedly people who have followed Islam and found themselves on a deeper level (Rumi comes to mind) and then there are people like Osama Bin Laden, who used it to justify murder. Its sort of like a map or a set of directions, just because people got lost doesn't mean the map is worthless. It still points in the right direction from my perspective

One of my favorite quotes of all time is this one by Melvana Rumi, an islamic mystic:

"I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door. It opens. I've been knocking from the inside."