To refuse to study other religious traditions as fully as you study your own culture is to promote bigotry. This tunnel vision, however, is the nature of orthodox religions such as orthodox Christianity, Judaism and Islam.  But there are now, and there always have been, in the history of these religions, pure Muslims, Jews and Christians who lived in peace with the people of other faiths.

   In southern France in the 13th century, Muslims, Jews and Christians lived together peacefully and worshipped in each others places of worship. They all lived together in Albigensian centers.  The Albigensians were vegetarian followers of Jesus.  See Helen Ellerby's The Dark Side of Christianity.

  Like Jews and Muslims, the Albigensian followers of the teachings of Jesus (and James) did not regard Jesus as a deity, but as a remarkable spiritual man like Mohammed and Moses. They recognized that Jesus Moses and Mohammed were all vegetarian, but that their teachings were revised by businessmen who derived profit from animal sacrifices, that is, the cattle/meat industry, as well as from from the institution of slavery in which the rich enslaved other humans to work for them, sometimes for low pay, sometimes for no pay at all, and just the bare subsistence of food, shelter and clothing. In every elitist society of rich and poor, it is inevitably the rich who determine the living standards of the rest of society. Call it a Plutocracy, or Oligarchy, the rule of the Rich is nothing less than another form of slavery.

   Just as in our friendships we do not tolerate those who treat us condescendingly, as inferiors, so too in our social relationships we should not tolerate those who do not love their neighbors as themselves, as equals.

    The original gospel written about the lives and the teachings of Jesus and his followers is called the Ebionite Gospel. It derives its name from the Hebrew word ebionim, which means "the poor." Jesus and his friends called themselves the Poor to let everyone know they were utterly opposed to the Rich, who followed the deity of Mammon, which means Wealth, or Riches.  The Ebionites, like the Essenes and Nazarenes, were the enemies of slavery and of economic inequality.  I would inform the reader that the relationship of inequality, inequity, and iniquity has always been understood intuitively by indigenous people more easily than it is understood by so called civilized people who are taught to believe differently in the schools established in industrial cultures.

  Unlike the orthodoxies, controlled of course by the rich, these real Muslims, Jews and Christians were egalitarian and truly practiced communalism and absolute equality as reflected in the teaching that all three of their founders taught: that we are all to love our neighbors as ourselves.

   When an orthodox Jew, orthodox Christian and orthodox Muslim says that it is the Old or New Testament or the Quran which is alone the repository of truth, and that other gods are pagan or infidel, they themselves manifest the monomaniacal norms that characterize all tyrannies.  When they choose to think of themselves as superior to those of other religions, it is these religions themselves which choose the path of bigotry and Ignorance.  They choose "to ignore" other traditions, especially those which promote compassion for all creatures and the healthier vegan vegetarian diet.