The nature of an Ideal

Last night my better half was explaining to me some of the work that she was going over in her mass violence and aggression class. After a rather lengthy conversation we got down to two statements that carried us into a two hour debate. She eventually claimed that Christianity and Islam are violent religions. To support her opinion she pointed out the many wars fought in the name of Christianity or Islam over the past several centuries, most notably the crusades occurring from 1095 to 1291. Her argument concluded by saying that religion is made up of people, and because without believers the religion would not exist the religion is defined by its followers. From that it follows that since the followers of Christianity have been notably violent, then the ideal of Christianity is a violent ideal.
I thought this was an interesting way of defining the nature of an ideal, but inevitably I disagreed with her. I had two problems with her argument; the first being that I do not believe that an ideal is defined by the people following the ideal. Take for example a paid artist who is very good with clay as a medium, and is very enthusiastic about painting. Sadly this artist is not very good at working with a paint brush. Now this artist has been truly inspired by the ideal of art to paint a sweeping landscape. Inevitably the artist fails to capture his inspiration on the canvas. Now imagine that this is the only artist to have ever existed. Now because it was impossible for this artist to capture his inspiration on canvas should we change our conception of art? Has art as an ideal changed because the followers of art are unable to demonstrate it perfectly to the rest of the world. No rather the ideal of Art is still unchanged in its perfection even though the followers of art are unable to personify the ideal.
Now having covered an example of ideals being unchanging in response to the ideals followers, the second question is, "Is the nature of Christianity (the ideal) Violent?" One way i thought about this was from a semantic approach, which meant for me to define Christianity. There are many sects that have a variety of beliefs, but are all defined as Christian. The consistent point that makes a sect a Christian sect is that they believe Jesus Christ was the son of god. Therefore we could simply define Christianity as that held belief. As such the Ideal of Christianity has nothing to say about violence or non-violence.
I unfortunately do not know nearly enough about Islam so last night our discussion centered around Christianity, and whether it was by its nature a violent religion. I decided to post some of the thoughts that came up during that conversation here, because i really like tinkering with what aspects gave an ideal definition. Sadly this landed me in hot water with the girl friend because she hates working with theoretical concepts like perfection. I tried to point out to her that to work with ideals you have to work with theoreticals because an ideal is defined as "the concept of something in its perfection." Naturally as soon as I brought the dictionary into the argument, it was time to watch a show together. In what I imagine is a normal home when someone pulls out a bible arguments tend to end with a "well if you are going to bring faith into it." But at my home this is what happens when someone pulls out a dictionary.

I know this doesn't directly relate to class, but Dr. G prompted us to post our thoughts as well.

Faith in the dictionary, probably not all that different from faith in a bible,
Hopper