This one is making the rounds, both on ABC's The View and by a religious leftist who says we need to wrestle with violence in the Scriptures.

The hostesses of The View says Hitler was a Christian, so who are Christians today to moralize about ISIS?

To me, it doesn't matter whether, hypothetically, Hitler or Timothy McVeigh yelled "I kill in the name of Christ!"  (Neither one claimed Christianity; both rejected it.)  We would judge them by their fruit and their conformity to the New Testament.

Which bring us to the religious leftist.

He is right that Christians need to wrestle with Old Testament violence, though he correctly says the New Testament has "turned a page."  But then he claims that New Testament rhetoric has it that Jesus preached violence against Jews.  Really?  Where is the verse?

Further, where is the verse that commands the church as a church to pick up swords and threaten to kill people if they don't convert?

Where is the verse that says that says Christians use violence to spread the gospel?

These passages don't exist for reasonable people who interpret the New Testament in good faith.  Bad-faith interpreters are laughed out of court.

The Old Testament and the Qur'an are different matters because verses in the latter are unmistakably about military war. 

What about the Crusades? objectors ask. 

Ideally, the church should have handed the sword over to the kings (Paul and Peter hand the sword over to the state: here for Paul and here for Peter). 

But the problem is that the kings saw themselves as God's anointed servants, much as the Old Testament kings were.  Separation of church and state didn't exist back then. 

And the Crusades were so long ago.  Christianity moved on.  Much of Islam has not. 

I hope this series wrestles with the topic of contrasting the two religions. 

The comparison between the two religions is misleading at best and vile at worst.

James Arlandson's website is Live as Free People, which is updated almost daily.