The most horrible conflicts between any traditions seem to occur when one group feels it is so dominant it can make one final push to purge the other.
Queen Isabella of Spain felt this in 1492 when she issued the Act of Expulsion, forcing Jews and Muslims and free-thinkers to convert, flee, or die.
In France, the king was advised there were only a handful of Protestants, so revoking the Edict of Nantes would be a good idea. It wasn't; the bloodshed climaxed in the the St. Bartholemew's Day Massacre. Geneva, where we live, was a huge beneficiary of this religious intolerance, tripling in population as it was flooded with Protestant refugee's from the French Catholic theocracy.
After centuries of pogroms and ghettos and massacres, the Jewish population in Europe had been marginalized enough that Hitler felt a Final Solution to the Jewish Question in Europe, as he called it, was possible, and the horrors of the Holocaust unfolded. (We always tend to forget that the Holocaust arose in Christian Europe, executed largely by men who considered themselves Christians, acting in accordance with a faith that included as part of its liturgy "the perfidy of the Jews"; nothing equivalent to this arose in the Muslim world.)
I think the only thing that can save us from slitting each other's throats is to recognize that however quaint our practices or absence of practices may seem, no one wants to kill a potentially paying customer, or start a pogrom against one group could conceivably target one's own group next. Christians in America no doubt feel they are in a secure enough position to threaten or intimidate the Muslim minority to build their mosques somewhere else or not at all; I doubt they would be so uncivil if they realized how many of their neighbors or co-workers are Muslim.
I agree that all three of the Mediterranean Monotheistic faiths (since 1 is literally an outgrowth of the first and the 3rd shares many revered prophets and teachings) have some pretty nasty things to say about those who do not believe in Yahweh or Allah, and give license to kill or ethnically cleanse not just those who have different practices, but even their animals and their children. If any Christian thinks this is not the case, then dig up a description of the war crimes God supposedly commanded Joshua to commit at the Jericho, and the rage with which the compassion of some of the men toward the unarmed and innocent was met. And to those who say that Jesus represented a departure from all that gore, why then is the Old Testament included as part of the Christian Bible, and why did Jesus never explicitly denounce it (he saw himself as collecting stray sheep to bring them back to the proper worship of Yahweh, and said he had come to fulfill the law, not to break it)?
The point is that as much as I would like to live in a world in which we all sit down and have some kind of modern Nicean Conference, where we decide what parts of these sacred texts were clearly a product of the men who wrote them and the times in which they lived, and create a new consensus document that reflects what we have learned over the past few hundred years, I doubt we can. I would love to excise the parts of the Bible that condone slavery and stoning adultresses, replacing them with promises that we will not do that again. I would love to create a thinner document, keeping all the poetry and messages of compassion and basic decency, but deleting pre-scientific overreaching about the supposed evils of eating shellfish, rotating crops, or wearing shirts of mixed fiber (such as cotton-polyester blends), all condemned by Leviticus. I would love to introduce what we now know about the distribution of same sex preferences in the human population, and the evils of hating each other for who we are rather than for the demonstrably bad things we do (like killing or bearing false witness). I would hope the new text would spend as much time exhorting us to be good people today as arguing over what might or might not have happened in Palestine 2,000 years ago. If this new text did risk getting bogged down in historicism, I wish it would be at least consistent, deciding, for example, whether there were 26 (Matthew) or 40 (Luke) generations between Jesus and David, and having at least one name overlap! (It would be nice to explain to those of us who know a thing or two about DNA to understand why the lineage of Joseph should matter since he is not the father of Jesus anyway.)
Scientific inaccuracies could be apologized for or at least corrected - the idea of the Sun revolving around an Earth only a few thousand years old inhabited for all of its existence (instead of only a tiny fraction) by people come to mind. Now that we know that 80% of biomass lives in water and that far greater mass extinctions predated the evolution of man, the myth of Noah's ark could be either eliminated or updated (although we are left with wondering why God would bother destroying most species hundreds of millions of years before the emergence of man - is it meaningful to say that microbes or early vertebrates worship or don't worship in the correct way? And what does this do to our idea of an anthropocentric world?)
Anyone who has read anything about quantum physics, anti-matter, dark forces, the big bang, walks away with a far greater sense of awe than one gets by reading what some Mediterranean authors 2,000 or more years ago felt would wow an audience. Why not work some of that in, with disclaimers that all of what we think we know about the world is subject to change pending further investigation and that no one will go to hell or be turned into bacon or a pillar of salt for changing their mind or asking questions about the world around them.
But since we cannot even agree on the far less controversial idea that a poor woman in Africa should be able to protect herself from her HIV-infected husband with a condom, or that the rise in temperatures and CO2 levels probably has a great deal to do with the explosive increase in fossil fuels worldwide (and it might be a good idea to explore alternatives), I doubt a frontal assault on Mediterranean Monotheism will work.
Instead, I think we are left with the more realistic strategy of not just tolerating diversity of religion, but encouraging it. Like a portfolio of risky assets, our society is paradoxically more stable and less likely to implode if many different faiths are both forced to get along with each other and in some respect cancel out each other's more extreme ideas. Again, it is very hard to hate all members of a religion or ethnic group if your son goes to Boy Scouts with them or you see them every day at work.
Religions, even ones that begin as extremist or cult-like (and that includes all religions probably if we could go back far enough in time), mellow out. Methodists and Quakers were once considered the real radicals; now they are considered either mainstream or at least harmless. Mormons (mostly) renounced polygamy because they lived in a part of the world that had changed over time to become exclusively monogamous (something not true of course of Abraham, Moses, or Mohammed). Most American Catholics use contraception and are a bit more likely statistically to get an abortion than their non-Catholic citizens because no doubt of the influence of competing traditions (including none at all) that are less restrictive in this area.
In the same way, Muslim immigrants, even hardcore ones, who might have some Biblical-era ideas about women (although most certainly don't) will mellow out over time, if that is the concern of the Sharia-is-coming! Sharia-is-coming! crowds trying to shout down the planners of a cultural center in Manhattan.
So yes, I would be in favor of creating or working toward a world where truthiness is encouraged and we all agree not to tell our children things that we don't know to be true (or to admit when things are articles of faith over which intelligent adults clearly do not all agree), but until then, we are stuck with the admittedly less desirable formula of letting all people decide for themselves how, if at all, they want to worship, and to whom, as long as exercising that right does not deprive other citizens of their rights - to a science-based education or the full spectrum of family planning services, for example.
I do have a problem with some of the more hateful and exclusivist teachings of Mediterranean Monotheism and think we should call them out on them. Teaching children they will go to hell forever and ever if they do not listen to the nuns or the priests or the imam is a form of child abuse worse than hitting them, and perhaps right up there with fondling them, since it shuts down curiosity and reason, fills them with terror of something no adult can know to be true (there may be some hell, but there may also be teapots among the rings of Saturn; the fact something cannot be disproven does not make it true), and teaches them to hate those who don't share their faith tradition (how can you respect someone if you secretly or not so secretly believe they are so hated by God he will torture them forever and ever, amen?). I do not know if fundamentalist Christians in the United States would have supported the invasion of Iraq so ardently if they did not believe that the 98% of Iraq that was not Christian was all going to hell anyway, but it's hard to imagine how one can feel true compassion for someone if you think their ideas are not only wrong, but offensive to the One True God.
For so long the Muslim world was the repository of learning and civilization. They gave a relatively primitive and much more religious Europe the number zero, the Hindu-Arabic numbering system, algebra, paper (via China), Greek philosophy (most of whose works had been burned as pre-Christian (and therefore bad) by the Christian mullahs overseeing intellectual life in Europe), and the first maps and compasses. They were tolerant toward Jews and non-Christians when they fled a Europe that was burning them alive, drowning them, or throwing them down wells. I think it's fantastic we have lately carved a clear line between church and state but let's not forget that many among us would love to return to the bad old days, and we had to make our own history.
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