What's the difference between an organized religion and other specific groups of people, though?

And honestly, pinning the actions of religious zealots on religious beliefs is about as sensible as pinning the actions of Jeffrey Dahmer on ****sexuals, imo. Without religion, people would find plenty of other reasons to be bigoted dickheads and blow **** up.

Not to attack a strawman, since you didn't say it, but I know the new popular canard against the religious is 9/11. Is it so hard to imagine that people without religion could still feel as dispossessed and angered at the United States and our manipulation of the Middle East as they do right now and would be willing to give everything to hurt us and help liberate their people, in their eyes?

I'm sure if we wanted, we could come up with plenty of other examples of people who use religion as a tool to justify doing what they want to do anyway and thus would have done it even without the religious pretense. I'd imagine that's a lot more rare than bad things that would absolutely not exist without religion, and I'm relatively certain that those bad things are pretty well balanced by the good things that come from religion.

ETA: To circle back around the original point - religion is not so bad, and bland, bigoted statements that imply that religious people just need to read a couple of things in order to 'cure' their religiousity are significantly worse. :P

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****phobia: The fear that a man will treat you the way that you treat women.