Religous hate crime

[QED]

Why is it that the first fifteen minutes of the TV News every evening seems to have the thread of religiously motivated hate running through it?

Whether it's on the scale of problems in the middle-east or a single nut-case murdering people in London:

Paranoid schizophrenic Torto had a hate list of sinners and those that did not follow his Christian faith who he wanted to kill, including homosexuals, gender changing clinics, off licences and nightclubs.

Maybe I'm too mesmerized by the knowledge that one of his victims: Mr Hamidi, was an Afghan national who had managed to flee the Taliban seven years before his murder. It brought back memories of one of the victims of the London bombings who had also escaped from one pan only to find herself in a religiously motivated fire.

Obviously these individual tragedies pale into insignificance when considered against the widespread grief inflicted upon people who would much rather be allowed to live in peace the world over, but these coincidences really seem to hammer home the all-pervasive nature of divisions generated by different ideologies that claim different knowledge of the same God.

So to the question for debate: Considering the religious undercurrents shaping conflicts around the world today, Is religion an innocent practice that becomes subverted into destructiveness by factions who would use any excuse to impose their will, or is religion the root cause of conflict such that the evening news would be less unpleasant if religion lost its grip on people (regardless of how likely a prospect such a transformation might be).

[QED]

What misconception is that? Are you saying that religious faith is based on an assumption of knowledge more comprehensive than we are actually able to possess?

I think so. In the debate topic Our Universe: one of many or specially designed? I set out how a far greater state-space for existence than the one we happen to occupy could be perceived as a creator God with specific intentions. As we are stuck within the confines of a horizon imposed by the finite speed of light in an expanding universe our knowledge cannot be so comprehensive as to distinguish one interpretation over the other.

But wherever I've raised this fundamental ambiguity (which is actually only one among many), it often seems to be news to those of a theistic persuasion. Because of this I frequently wonder if people are, possibly without being conscious of the fact, swayed by the apparent necessity for a cosmic creator in order to order the universe.

(A note about the terms I'm using: Cosmos is a term that combines two important components: "order" and "everything there is". The latter is subject to our past light-cone i.e. the distance horizon imposed by lightspeed, the age of the universe (the region of space-time we are connected to) and its rate of expansion. We have no accurate way of knowing how much else there might be beyond this horizon, let alone whether it's ordered in the same way.)

[Furrowed Brow]

If instead our credo is acknowledged as being man-made then we can "explain our workings" in a way that can't be done between different religious factions.

No argument from me that is man made. But does it take a certain kind of mentality to see oneself as owning the “truth“. It seems to me that there is not a huge gap between say a died in the wool hard line communist and a religious fundamentalist.

Over many threads I have now probably bored everyone to distraction with appeals for a falsification principle. Something both religion and communism lack. Perhaps the real villains are ideologies that cannot accept they might ever be wrong - even in principle. Thus there is no room for dissent, or self criticism and doubt.

(I guess theists might want to jump right back and say they have doubted their religion. But personal self doubt is not the same thing as an unfalsifiable ideology).

[Alamanach]

In the debate topic Our Universe: one of many or specially designed? I set out how a far greater state-space for existence than the one we happen to occupy could be perceived as a creator God with specific intentions...

Thanks for the link. That thread was 14 pages, of which I read only the first 7, but I think I see where you are coming from...

...But does it take a certain kind of mentality to see oneself as owning the “truth“. It seems to me that there is not a huge gap between say a died in the wool hard line communist and a religious fundamentalist.

Over many threads I have now probably bored everyone to distraction with appeals for a falsification principle. Something both religion and communism lack. Perhaps the real villains are ideologies that cannot accept they might ever be wrong - even in principle...

...There are religions out there that recognize that there is more to the world than we know:

"If any one say that in Divine Revelation there are contained no mysteries properly so called (vera et proprie dicta mysteria), but that through reason rightly developed (per rationem rite excultam) all the dogmas of faith can be understood and demonstrated from natural principles: let him be anathema" (Sess. III, Canons, 4. De fide et Ratione, 1)

But admiting you don't know some things and admitting that some of what you do know could be wrong are obviously not the same. I think the problem of factionalization as you (QED) are describing it comes from this latter problem. Anybody, religious or not, is going to get bull-headed when he refuses to allow that he might have something wrong in his beliefs.