It has been quite an exciting journey into Hector Avalos’ important book, Fighting Words. The Origins of Religious Violence. In this last episode dedicated to this topic, we briefly review Avalos’ last few chapters where he provides a synthesis and some solutions to the issue of religion and violence. We end this series with a quote found at the end of the book on the scholar’s responsibility toward the topic at hand: “Most academic scholars are not so frank in acknowledging that their scholarship is an apologetic enterprise. Given the violence in the scriptures we have examined, I would suggest that the opposite should be our mission. Our job as biblical scholars is to undermine the value of any scripture that endorses violence. […] We become complicit in violence when we attempt to maintain the value of a book whose main truth claims can never be verified. […] Our final mission, as scholars of these scriptures, must be to help humanity close the book on a long chapter of human misery.â€