Corruption of the faith: many people over the ages have used various religions as a guise for acquiring power, and justifying violence as a means to an "enlightened" end.

The transcript of the cockpit voice-recording is chilling: "Allah is the greatest" is repeated nine times in the last seven seconds of Flight 93. The Boeing 757 aircraft then hit the ground in southern Pennsylvania at more than 900 km/h.

United Airlines Flight 93 was, of course, one of the four ill-fated planes hijacked on 9/11. The hijacker calling to Allah tells us he was a Muslim. This has given rise to him and his fellow hijackers being routinely referred to as "Islamic extremists." But, Islam has absolutely nothing to do with it. The atrocities of 9/11 and so many others before and since are rooted in a human corruption of Islam.

All religions have suffered similar fates.

As Karen Armstrong points out in her 2006 book The Great Transformation (ISBN: 0375413170) all the world's great religions have started out with the same premises; they all exalt compassion, love, and justice over selfishness and hatred.

Each tradition came up with its own version of the Golden Rule to "Treat others as you want to be treated." Here's how the 13th century Muslim scholar al-Nawawi put it: "None of you [truly] believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself."

But then, evil people saw how religion could be exploited to serve their ambitions, whether greed or a thirst for power. The people were manipulated into believing their faith was the only true one; all others had to be loathed and feared. The followers didn't dare challenge the leaders who sold this corrupted version of their faith; to do so, they were told, would lead to some fearsome punishment from their god.

The Rev. Charles Kimball has given us a handy guide to spot a religion falling into corruption. In his 2003 book When Religion Becomes Evil (ISBN: 0060556102) he says there are five signs to watch for:

* The claim to be the one and only path to God;

* The demand for blind obedience to religious leaders;

* The belief that the end of the world is predicted through one faith;

* The justification of using bad means to achieve a good end and,

* The declaration of a holy war. Christianity has had its share of all of these evils--the Crusades, the Inquisition, and more recently, the People's Temple of Rev. Jim Jones. A Jewish extremist, Yigal Amir, murdered Israel's Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. Mr. Amir, angered by Mr. Rabin's peace overtures with Palestinians, said "Everything I did, I did for the glory of God." Canadians have experienced the extremism of some Sikhs--the ones who blew up an Air India jumbo jet in 1985, killing all 329 people on board. And, of course, we get daily reminders of how extremists have corrupted Islam.

Karen Armstrong believes the violence could end if the world's great religions went back to their founding ideas--compassion, kindness, and the Golden Rule. In an interview with Bill Moyers on PBS she said "I spend my life writing and talking and reading and studying spirituality and God. And, I cannot see in essence any one of these three faiths (Christianity, Islam, Judaism) as superior to any of the others. I suppose one of my hopes in life is to try to get Jews, Christians, and Muslims to realize the profound unanimity, the unanimous vision that they share, and to join hands together to stop the kind of cruelty, violence, and obscenity, moral obscenity, that we saw on September the 11th."