I'm not sure what Reza Aslan would argue for religious texts; and I don't even think that's his main concern, since his conversation seems to be directed at people like 'new atheists" such as Bill Maher and Sam Harris ( 9/11 liberals who rant against Islam pretty frequently), or the other side of the political spectrum: Sean Hannity / Fox News types who foam at the mouth about Islam.

I think the principle fallacy of not just to the so-called New Atheists*, but I think of a lot of critics of religion, is that they believe that people derive their values, their morals, from their religion. That, as every scholar of religion in the world will tell you, is false.

People don’t derive their values from their religion — they bring their values to their religion. Which is why religions like Judaism, Hinduism, Christianity, [and] Islam, are experienced in such profound, wide diversity.

So it sounds like you’re saying that someone like Bill Maher is taking what is sort of a Rorschach test and treating it like a how-to guide or an instruction set, when that’s not really what it is.

That’s a very nice way of putting it, yeah. I mean, it’s an understandable but almost comically simplistic view of religion, which is, I think, just to get off-topic for a moment, the entire problem with the so-called New Atheist movement is that it gives atheism a bad name. This is not the philosophical atheism of Schopenhauer or Marx or Freud or Feuerbach. This is a sort of unthinking, simplistic religious criticism. It is primarily being fostered by individuals — like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins — who have absolutely no background in the study of religion at all.

Most of my intellectual heroes are atheists, but they were experts in religion, and so they were able to offer critiques of it that came from a place of knowledge, from a sophistication of education, of research. What we’re seeing now instead is a sort of armchair atheism — people who are inundated by what they see on the news or in media, and who then draw these incredibly simplistic generalizations about religion in general based on these examples that they see.

This is the thing — it’s not that you can interpret away problematic parts of a scripture. It’s that the scriptures are inundated with conflicting sentiments about almost every subject. In other words, the same Torah that tells Jews to love their neighbor also tells them to kill every single man, woman, and child who doesn’t worship Yahweh. The same Jesus who told his disciples to give away their cloaks to the needy also told them to sell their cloaks and buy swords. The same Quran that tells believers if you kill a single individual, it’s as though you’ve killed all of humanity, also tells them to slay every idolater wherever you find them.

So, how do you, as an individual, confront that text? It’s so basic, a child can understand: The way that you would give credence or emphasis to one verse as opposed to the other has everything to do with who you are. That’s why they have to sort of constantly go back to this notion of an almost comical lack of sophistication in the conversations that we are having about religion. And to me, there’s a shocking inability to understand what, as I say, a child would understand, which is that religions are neither peaceful nor violent, neither pluralistic nor misogynistic — people are peaceful, violent, pluralistic, or misogynistic, and you bring to your religion what you yourself already believe.

Source: Reza Aslan on What the New Atheists Get Wrong About Islam (http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2014/10/reza-aslan-on-what-the-new-atheists-get-wrong.html)
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* new atheists : The New Atheists are authors of early twenty-first century books promoting atheism. These authors include Sam Harris (The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason), Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon), and Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything).