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I'd love if some smart guy writer/cultural commentator could investigate the general suspicion I think most of us have in that it's not actually faith that is poisoning our society, but the institutions people build around the ideas of faith. They could start with all of the obvious contradictions involved in being a Christian, like how the Old Testament tells us we can do all of these horrible things to people, yet Jesus is a rather different affair in the New. Yet people still manage to inappropriately conflate the messages of the two to suit their own clannish bigotries. They could move from there to the Shia apostasy, to the caste system in India, and on, and on...
Sounds like an organizational issue to me, and if, as a society, we're going to condemn anything, it should be the super structure that tells you how to channel your harmless, personal feelings about a "higher" power into an intolerance towards other people who are actually corporeal and have the same human qualities you do. Then again, we're only human. We can't be expected to, like, transcend our worse impulses, can we?
