It's always a sure sign that you are talking to a liberal multiculturalist or reading their crap when something as extreme as suggesting that a dissident should be killed for her beliefs gets euphemistically labeled a debate over freedom of religion. I don't think you could call that a "debate" anymore than you could call what recently happened at Virginia Tech "a day off from class." You can't have a debate with someone who thinks that God has handed down the order to kill you the moment that you freely, of sound mind and body, decide to leave the faith.
And yet there will be many people who will say that Islam is a religion of peace, despite the fact that it commands its followers to do many things which in the context of a purely secular political movement would be labeled psychotic. I guess that's just another sign that most secularists really don't take religion seriously to the point that they are unwilling to apply any of the standards to religious beliefs that they would to political beliefs.
Most of the humanists I've met know very little about the religions they comment on. Oh, they might know a few facts, maybe even throw in a worthless comment such as "religion is responsible for 95% of all wars", but they truly lack any insight into a person's worldview when it is faith-based.
Hense why it's "faith" based, perhaps?
It is a religion of peace as long as you submit to it.
Otherwise...
And you can tell you're talking to a conservative troglodyte when you try to tell him there are many ways to interpret Islam and many of them do not involve killing someone who leaves the faith. The verses in question in the Qur'an had to do with people who not only left the faith but actively tried to kill the first Muslims by betraying them to their enemies. If you'd been one of the early Muslims you'd have wanted the apostates dead too.
(I know this is a really old post but I ran into that ridiculous Bloggers Code of Conduct and saw you trackbacked from there, so...)
As to jimmmyb's remark about "submit[ing] to" Islam, that is not correct--the name of the faith implies submission to God, not to itself. Assuming the existence of an omnipotent, omnipresent God who created the universe and upon whose will that universe's continued existence rests, we would by definition submit to that God by virtue of our existence. That's the basic premise of Islam. I have no opinion one way or the other whether Islam's version of showing proof of submission to God is the valid one, I only find it sad that conservatives continuously overlook the things that Christians and Jews have done in the name of *their* respective faiths when Christianity mandates pacifism and Judaism doesn't call for any less violence than Islam does. So everyone ought to condemn Christians for their crimes, and ought to be painting Zionist Jews with the same broad brush of "mindless fanatical violence" that they do Muslims. What, is it that Jews look white?
Too bad the mainstream consensus since then has been that this fine distinction you make is not valid.
Another distinction without a difference in practice.
The difference is that what they did cannot be reconciled with their religions. For example, Luke 9 unequivocally condemns forced conversions of non-believers. Any Christian who does that does so against their religion, whereas a Muslim has a good argument for how he or she is a true believer by waging war on others in the name of their religion to expand its sphere of influence.
The only violence the Zionist Jews are guilty of is excessive force in self-defense. They gained control of their land through the right of conquest, a right that, regardless of whether or not you believe it is right, exists. The chief complaint of the Palestinians is that they do not have the military power to revoke the right of conquest that the Zionist Jews used to take control of Israel. The chief complaint of their Arab neighbors is that the Palestinians might actually be happy with the land they have left, which would result in them no longer having the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as a scapegoat for their own internal problems.