Kali: "the point is religion is not what make people murder". 

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Darwin: "I beg to differ..."
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This is similar to the argument on whether guns kill or people do.  The answer is both!
Just like whether it's nature or nurture.  The answer is both!
Just like whether a baby exists before or after birth.  Both ... depending on the definition or perspective!

It's not a black and white world.  We have many wavelengths of photon radiation in between.
You see one reflection of light, while I may see another -- from the same source.  Or, we may see the same rainbow.
The British see "grey", while Americans see "gray".

The real answer, IMO, is that culture/religion provides a background for socialization, from which an individual personality emerges and becomes a killer in some situations and not others.  As Darwin indicates, an individual can change their ways through experience and interpretation.
 

I do agree with their "truth" being challenged - that is universal even in killings that don't involve religion - take for instance a man who kills his wife because his truth that she is "his" is challenged so he says if I can't have her, no one can. . . That goes to the root of a person's power - even if it is on a small individual level. . .

I do think that in each country there is a religion that persecutes others - but the way to end that is to band together and say sit your @$$es down already! :-)

I agree - in each person exists the possibilities for killing - it is just a question of motivation - I would only do if forced to in defending myself and/or my children.  Some will kill for religion, some will be religious and kill for a completely different reason.

No - because that is not a picture I would participate in - I am smart enough to know that sacrifice is stupid, and that no God is not going to reward murder with food.  Instead he/she expects you to get a job and pay for your own food or you can become a farmer and raise your own food but killing others does not bring in good crops, just the police.

Ants, from another perspective, may have evolved a well developed sense of consciousness as social entities or "superorganisms". [Post #32]

 

True. Definitely a fascinating argument that many have advanced and of some plausibility. If we can argue that at some point there is enough “integrated information” in the human brain to turn on the light of consciousness then it certainly seems justified to argue that similar processes and results might reasonably take place in “social entities” such as ants.

 

Although that is still evading the question you asked earlier and that I rephrased: which would you rather be, an individual ant, krill or human? Or, more or less equivalently at least as a rough analog, a colony of ants or a colony of neurons inside a human skull? :-)

Therefore, I agree that pursuit in the "right" direction is pleasurable, and a complicated (multi-factored) set of perceived attainment leads to "happiness" -- for awhile.

 

Definitely a somewhat ephemeral and transitory state – particularly for such “discontented pendulums” as we are.

Well Law and Order is what separates us from the critters . . .
Or wait, now once one of their own turns rouge and starts killing of its own, it generally gets taken down either by group or by something bigger/meaner. . .

No - that was just pure stupidity and ignorance - petty minds going after those who were different and killing them in hopes of eliminating those not just like them.

Law and Order as is when you beat your wife - you get sentenced to jail time. . .

I do agree with their "truth" being challenged - that is universal even in killings that don't involve religion .... [Post #43]

 

Yes, good point. However, an important distinguishing feature – which you seem to be rather too quick to discount, is, I think, the magnitude of the effects: a mistake on the part of an individual may lead only to the death of no more than a few of their own immediate neighbors, but one on the part of a whole group can lead literally to the deaths of millions.

 

Apropos of which, I’m in the midst of reading Ibn Warraq’s Why I Am Not a Muslim – which I would highly recommend to you, and others. And the author, in the process of painting a quite damning picture of Muhammad as a “pious fraud”, notes an observation of a scholar in the field that:

 

Religion is gravely infected with intellectual dishonesty. [Richard Robinson; pg 25]   

 

It is one thing to think that one’s religion has something important to say about morality without being dogmatic about it, but quite another – crossing the Rubicon as a matter of fact – to insist that one is speaking for god – as far too many are far too quick to be doing.

Or wait, now once one of their own turns rouge and starts killing of its own ... [Post #53]

 

You mean sort of like them damn Reds and Pinkos, say, for examples, a dirty rotten Communist or a Communist sympathizer’s wife (a Pink Lady)? .... I think you probably mean “rogue” ...  :-)

… how in the world could a single organism or a single cell (even a neuron) within our own bodies make such a call without experiencing in detail what every other living entity experiences?  [Post #59]

 

Not sure that I follow exactly what you’re getting at there, maybe in part because the process by which a multiplicity of entities – ants, presumably, or neurons or, supposedly, individual organisms in the global ecosystem – manifests consciousness is such a mystery.

 

Sort of gives more credibility to the Gaia Hypothesis, huh?

 

I think so, at least to some extent.