^ I used to play the "look at Christianity, look at the Inquisition, look at the old-school Catholic Church," card a lot as a Muslim, and in some ways I still believe that widespread modernity might still find Islam as a whole calming down a bit, but now I do wonder more about the obvious differences that I barely cared to acknowledge back then.
The fact that it is easy to kind of squirm out of the evil stuff in Christianity and view it as outdated or not compulsory, and the fact that the Quran is the eternal word of God makes me wonder if there's a limit to how improved Islam can get, or if, perhaps, it will be a religion where, even if the mainstream Muslims all become watered-down Quranists with a metaphorical understanding of Islam, you will always and forever have the "extremists" cropping up here and there and making a lot of noise.
