ABSTRACT
Throughout these commentaries I argue that the attitude to peace and violence is the key marker for understanding where any post-Axial faith stands. The Axial revolution radically reduces the diacritical markers to a strictly limited set. For my analytic purposes I begin here with a faith’s attitude to violence, not with whether it believes in God. The kind of God worshipped by a given faith depends on that faith’s attitude to violence. That implies, incidentally, that confronted by the monotheistic God of Islam I am a devout atheist. It is not remotely a question as to whether there is any evidence that such a God exists. After all, classical theology makes it very clear that God does not exist alongside other existences. The question that concerns me is the nature of God and whether he is worthy of worth-ship.
