The religious difference is the "good reason" to some, isn't it? It provides the boundary between "us" and "them." People have been protecting "us" by killing "them" since the beginning of time.


Maybe that's true, but who gets to decide, and on what basis, what "defective" means? Who even gets to decide which is more and which is less defective?



People learn about things they believe to be true. The difficulty arises in that what's true to some is not so true to others. In the "west" it's commonly held that suppressing the right to education, for example, of half the population, e.g. women, is wrong. It would appear that at least a fifth of the world's population doesn't agree with that notion.

Some people believe that regligion is an idustry that seeks to extract a living from the feeble-minded without doing anything useful. In some cultures, it's even held to be a valid course of study. Politics, too, is a field of dubious value to the society at large. Don't both these pursuits simply interpose one group between the rest and their resources? Don't they simply say, "Let us do your thinking for you"?

This whole notion of "good versus evil" is a big fiction isn't it? When something is good for me, isn't it just as likely it's evil for someone else? When I have that nice beef roast for Sundeay dinner, it's really good for me, but it doesn't work out so well for the beef that provided it.

RE