"His point is that any religion that explicitly calls for the INITIATION of force in its sacred texts is invalid."
Read the 3rd chapter of Deuteronomy lately? The Old Testament of the Bible, while Jewish in origin, is still read by Christians as a sacred text. But I guess if the Caananites followed evil, false gods it was okay to slaughter them and take their land.
As to the horrors of the 'Burning Times' (as today's neopagans like to call them) there's little historical doubt that a few hundred folks who actually believed themselves to be in league with you-know-who were running around Europe, along with a few tens of thousands of holdout pagans.
Millions died horribly, all in the name of God, including St. Joan herself.
1) Can't comment directly on the Old Testament part, but that's why I also mentioned the Catecism. Also, our information about the Caananites is rather limited. Maybe they were so corrupt that their society had to be crushed and you would agree if you were there. Societies like those formed by the Nazis didn't just exist in the 20th century you know. There was real hard-core baby-killing human-sacrifice stuff going on back then. If the Aztecs existed today, would you believe it was moral for them to keep capturing slaves from neighboring tribes and sacrificing them by the 1000's, or would you support an 'intervention and re-education program' by the U.S. Marines? Besides, when was the last time that any current Chrisitian used those passages to justify anything?
2) I agree that most of them were false accusations made by people who performed them because they were politically or personally convenient. The point was that Christianity isn't 'fundamentally' corrupt, since it clearly prohibits the bringing of false or unsupported accusations against absolutely anyone. Once the identification, enactment and enforcement of decent rules of evidence in court cases began, the witch trials dried up rather rapidly.
3) Check out the life of Mohammed, compare to the life of Christ. If the difference isn't obvious, then check out the differences in the expected norms of behavior towards kaffirs and Muslims in Islam. If you can't see the difference, then we have nothing to discuss.