Willis – you agreed with Bob K on this:
What you have identified is not something specific to a belief system, but something that is inherent to the social behavior of human beings.
However, that pretty much invalidates your idea that religion would be the cause of hateful behavior by people against people.
If there hadn’t been religion, or communism, or the Tamerlane’s dreams of conquest, or Hitler’s Lebensraum, or Nero’s sadistic pleasures, or or or…well, humans would have found some other reason to kill each other. Agreed?
ps Alcohol is another “cause” of a great number of deaths. Would you seriously write tirades against C2H5OH?