Islam and Christianity should be cast aside as ideologies.
If only! But people like their tribes, whether its country, religion, politics or sports teams. Or some combination.
The flaws in both are so vast as shown a million times by a million people. Not to say there aren't some good aspects to take from them, but the ideologies force you to take the good with the bad.
Exactly! Regardless of how good any individual religious person might be, they must, to some degree "hate" the other.
How else can they affirm their god-given superiority?
I had a professor once, he said a good ideology is one where the philosopher has taken great care to ensure that it can't be corrupted. You think of the worst case scenarios of what could be done with a given philosophy and then you change or even abandon the philosophy so they can't happen. The ancient Greek philosophers did this. German philosophers in 18th century didn't do this, and Marx didn't, so horrors resulted. Nietzsche didn't, and horrors resulted.
It seems to me that power leads to corruption and to horrors. Hardly matters the ideilology. Religious or political, or even just guards overseeing prisoners in a brief experiment.
Certain English enlightenment philosophers like John Locke and the US founding fathers took great pains to make sure their ideology, liberal democracy, would be extremely difficult to corrupt. They built in ideas like separation of powers, checks and balances, term limits etc. to avoid abuse. They built in an amendment procedure in case changes needed to be made, but made that process difficult enough so it too couldn't be abused.
Perhaps Trump will be the test of how effective those safeguards are.
Christianity and Islam are easily corruptible. They rely on a lot of interpretation, which is subjective. It also says this is the final word and can't be changed and if you don't believe this you're going to hell. Very dangerous stuff.
Gotta agree. But it is also true, about both religions, that it is ultimately those in power and those on the fringes that practice and support the worst interpretations. Most people simply want to live in peace and as much prosperity as they can muster.
Islam is so flawed that war broke out the moment Mohammad died because followers couldn't agree on who should lead the movement after his death.
Whether Mohammed or Jesus, the effect one person has had on billions of people for millenia is astounding.
Religion is garbage because it's incompatible with reason or logic and that makes it dangerous.
Humans generally are incompatible with logic or reason, once they believe something to be true.