Dumb Luck and Religious Violence

It's easy to see why people can say, that yeah, religion is at fault for this stuff that such and such people say and do and cite religion as their motivation and point out chapter and verse that says they should. But, really, you can do the same with the same religion to do the opposite in just about every case. It largely depends on the culture, and the culture is fed by and feeds religion and the culture.

It's basically chaotic. Run the world over again and you might have suicide bombers accepting principles of Crusade (citing chapter and verse) from the intellectual backwater of Europe locked never ending dark age.

Religion isn't very helpful, but it's hardly the root of all evil. They are all equally based on flawed epistemology, arguing that one is worse than another just because a lot of those who accept that religion do horrible things and there's horrible cultural trends within that cultural tradition, that are largely absent in our own, doesn't really work that way. It just happens that most of the Muslim world is now an intellectual backwater with completely unmodern and violent cultural outcroppings.

And yeah, we likely need to keep such people away from jet airplanes and nuclear weapons. But, it's really not intrinsically worse than the western traditional cultures, it just that western culture went towards science and progress and modernity and dragged Christianity along for the ride. It's not superiority, it's basically dumb luck. The religions are all just as false as one another. And claiming that Christianity is better than Islam because Christians don't blow themselves up or Christians invented telescopes, is really just saying X is better than Y because of things that are basically dumb luck. Paganism isn't true because they invented science and math and philosophy, it's again just dumb luck.