Doing something in someones name when they tell you to do it is only those folks doing the same thing by proxy.
What zarqawi does, what Saddam did, is the very same thing.
Intimidation through threat of punishment for thought other than what is dictated. True there is a distinct difference in who is doling out the punishment. But, I think you would agree, the threat of punishment for differing thought remains the same from both zarqawi or Saddam and God.
I didn't equate the person to the god, I compared the threats from both for lack of belief and lack of following along. A book says ALLAH, a book says God. I wouldn't say Allah is God, but I would say they are both books written by man.
Are you to claim that differences negate similarities? I would offer that is an interesting angle. Let me apply that to another example and see if it fits.
One orange has seeds, one doesn't. You can say Both are oranges, but not that both have seeds. This angle you pose seems to point out that saying they are both oranges is incorrect because they have a difference when it comes seeds.
Nope, I don't understand what you were trying to convey to me.
Zarqawi et al. seem to think that they are self-deputized to kill all those who have not converted to Islam.
Christians and Jews do not currently believe and practice such things.
As evidence for this, you have sharia law in varying degrees, from the Sudan to Pakistan to (until recently) Afghanistan. Theocracy? How about fusion of church and state?
Here in the (mostly Christian, in cultural memory if not in daily practice) you get Michael Newdow suing to have "In God We Trust" removed from the currency, after it was added during the 1950's to draw a distinction between the US and Marxists, and NOT to shove Christianity down people's throats. (Not that it would have been shoving anyway, no-one was forced to convert).
If the US had really been the theocracy atheists love to worry about, Newdow would be in a torture camp in Northern Alaska, instead of mouthing off on the MSM.
As far as theology, yes, there are significant differences between Christianity and Islam. If you read Free Republic enough, you will come across the quotes from the Koran (or you can Google) that go approximately like this: The tree will say, "Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him."
Compare this to the Christian "I ask then, has God rejected His people [the Jewish people]? Of course not! For I too am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin."
Or to put it another way, if you tell a Christian in a Christian country that "Mohammed died for your sins" he'll either snicker or remind you of 9-11. But if you tell a Muslim in an Islamic country that "Jesus died for your sins" you'll be lucky to escape prison.
As far as your fruit analogy, it is circular reasoning, since you stipulate at the beginning that they are both oranges. If you were looking at object-oriented programming languages such as C++ or Java, they WOULD be different; one would be a superclass of the other. The analogy to religion is that one might be an improvement on, or a heresy, of the other.
Of course both the Bible and the Koran were written by men. The relevant questions are how much of the contents were inspired by man, by God, or by other supernatural entity; the fidelity to the inspiration (as in "hi-fi" records vs. MP3); how corrupted the writings are compared to the original sources; and how cultural and language differences have affected the interpretation--there is reciprocal influence in some of these, too.
Cheers!