Flickr/John Lemieux

It’s across the board.

There are many ugly flaws within certain Muslim cultures around the world. Women get few basic rights in many Muslim cultures, and they can be raped or murdered with little recourse in some places. Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia allow gay people to be stoned to death for simply being gay. Freedom of speech is constantly under attack all over the Middle East. That being said, oppression and extremism are not strictly Muslim issues— they are seen in every religion.

I’m not saying religion inherently breeds extremism in every person who makes it a part of their lives, but religion does create a basic framework for extremism in people’s minds. When people have something to die for or an eternal vacation in the Virgin Islands awaiting them when they die, they tend to lose some rationality.

Christians in Uganda kill people for being gay or perform “corrective rape” to turn them into heterosexuals. Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar are regularly slaughtered, sometimes burned alive, by the country’s Buddhist majority. Americans shoot up churches and other public spaces in the name of religion, or they set clinics that perform abortions on fire. The KKK and the Westboro Baptist Church use Christianity to justify their hatred.

What could be more dire for a truly religious person than protecting their clan and making the whole world know their god is the true god? The sickness that can be created by that train of thought can bend minds and lead to horrific acts.

While there are many moderates in each religion, some of this extremism is state sponsored and supported by the public. The majority of Ugandans are cool with killing gays for God, just like the majority of Saudi Arabians don’t mind the government beheading or crucifying people for religious reasons.

Islam is just seeing its own version of The Crusades in certain ways. Each religion goes through an especially violent and callous time, and it’s usually led by the fundamentalists. There may be many moderates, but the extremists are currently having a more forceful impact on the world. When people were using #TerrorismHasNoReligion on Twitter after the recent attacks in Paris, they should have been using #TerrorismHasEveryReligion.