By James Donahue

When Americans look at people of the Moslem faith they tend to think of them all as potential terrorists. In actuality, the Moslem extremists capable of blowing themselves up to attack an enemy are members of radical sects comprising a very small percent of the world followers of Mohammad.

Among Christians, statisticians have discovered, there is a much larger percentage of killers and supporters of the Bush concept of torture. They seem to come out of the Evangelical Bible believers, who in 2007 comprised about 28.6 percent of the population in the United States.

A recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that white evangelical Protestants were most likely to say torture is “often or sometimes” justified, while people not affiliated with any religious organizations were least likely to back it.

Interestingly enough, the so-called “mainline” Protestant Christians from churches like Episcopalians, Lutherans and Presbyterians, were mostly likely to say that torture is never justified. Most Roman Catholics didn’t support torture either.

Another Pew survey among “National Christians,” thus indicating a broad sweep of all denominations, found that among those responding, two thirds favored the death penalty for anyone convicted of murder.

They cited the Biblical teachings and a belief that the death penalty served as a deterrent to others as the primary reason for supporting capital punishment.

It appears, however, that it is the Evangelical, or “Bible-Believing” Christians who predominately favor the death penalty, and that a growing number of mainstream Christians are no longer supporting it because of new revelations that innocent people have been executed due to an imperfect legal system.

The bottom line to all of this is that the Evangelical Christians appear to be more of a terrorist threat than the small group of radical terrorist cells that have emerged from the Islamic world. A study of the Bible makes it clear that this is, truly, a bloody religion that portrays a god that advocates killing and warfare as a way of bringing justice. The very story of the arrest, persecution and murder of Jesus as an “atonement” for the sins of mankind is a perfect example of this twisted way of thinking.

Former President George W. Bush, a declared born-again believer, appears to have thought himself directed by god and therefore completely justified when he sent American troops into Afghanistan and Iraq to start wars there during his term in office. And he never winced about torturing the captors of those wars. He thus became the world’s worst terrorist without realizing what he had become.

We can, in a sense, come to an understanding of why the Bible-thumping “believers” in Evangelical circles easily support torture and the killing of people convicted of high crimes.

A similar study of the Koran, the holy book of the Islamic faith, reveals no such teachings. Mohammad, one of the great prophets in the past who came among us to steer mankind on a better spiritual path, never advocated the kind of violence adopted by terrorist gangs. Like many contemporary Christian cults, these groups are obviously taking the words of Mohammad out of context to justify their actions.

The majority of the Islamic people know better.