First, let me say I respect Johnson's opinion and would most likely say his points make a good foundation from which to proceed...with one exception. Aside from history, Christians and Jews and Islamics believe there are spiritual forces at work behind and within the human activity that makes up history as we know it. Johnson has recited (and, well, if I say so) the human forces that make up the history of this period. If one goes back over that first millennium after Christ and lays the human activity over a surmised battle between Good and evil, everything takes on a different hue. One can see the push and pull of those forces over time like a cosmic chess match (the rules are quite clear also). But step aside from that point (you can see the general direction in which it takes us) and look at one final point...
From Rome forward to Agincourt (and beyond), violence was a civilized affair and was the sole means of employment for the nobles. Farming and merchandising were left to more menial peoples and serfs on the vassals'estates. All good men were men of arms. Why is that so? I don't know. I think it was part of the evolution of the concept of honor. Jesus introduces a new kind of honor...and for two thousand years men and women have sought it only to define it as something bound up in the times in which we lived.
Only now, and only in the west, has honor started to find new definition (I think our President is helping...and I think the Pope has just now thrown down the real gauntlet).
Honor as define by Jesus is voluntary obedience to God. That isn't violence but something else that in the end only God can define and man can only seek.
Bottom-line, I don't blame humans much for the earlier tendency toward the sword. The problem is letting go of the sword. Christianity can do it because Christianity can evolve with culture...islam cannot.
Islam's prohibition from rational, empirical examination of itself has trapped it in the 7th century. The Pope IMO is planning to say to the muslim world "none of us is innocent...let's look at the past and make amends."
This I believe will be the great challenge for islam. Some will examine it and see the truth and change islam or abandon it...others will refuse and will face the annihilation you suggest.
Whew!
The problem is letting go of the sword. Christianity can do it because Christianity can evolve with culture...islam cannot.
That, I can agree with.