Gregg, excuse my exuberance please, it wasn't meant to offend.
The point I'm attempting to make is that if there is some divine guidance in following the prime mover that history clearly demonstrates that one could not perceive the difference between a person that is guided and a person that is not.
Certainly you'll find non-believers committing the same atrocities, but they're not claiming that it is for a divine purpose. They don't lure in the innocent, dependent, and seeker of support with promises of life after death, honey & virgins to do their bidding, nor do they claim moral authority. They're not using physiological manipulation through sensory overload to convince someone that this is truth. They don't require the person to face to the east many times per day and capture thought energy through repetitive injury.
This is the product of a theory without evidence.
The idea has been fruitful in that it has been able to accumulate great wealth and power through manipulation throughout the eons, but I would argue that it has been a destructive force in our development as a species. The idea…has pitted men against men, villages against villages, nations against nations and east against west. There and millions in the US that would kill a Commie at first sight, not because they might be from Russia, but because they don't have a god. The funny part is that the Believer doesn't have a god either; they have an idea and an organization to support the notion without evidence.
If a corporation employs people who do not represent the mission statement, they have an obligation to discipline or remove them; Manifest Destiny was never addressed because it served the organization. One could argue that because the organization is so large and diverse that it wouldn't be possible to oversee everyone, but I would recount by arguing that this is supposed to be divine providence and no human discipline should be needed. Certainly one would have to agree that discipline has been used against followers that did not follow closely. A visit to Salem Mass would certainly set the record straight.
If one looks at the world today, and sees the conflicts around the world they would notice a similar thread running though most of them. Genocide by Muslims in Africa in the name of Allah to capture oil and riches. The power is in the organized religion, not in the national identity. The Israelis relocating to the Promise land, displacing a hundred thousand Palestinians in their wake and justifying their actions under the command of their god, this is not Nation building it's Kingdom building. A logical man would conclude that a voice from the clouds is ridicules and have no reason to commit atrocities to fulfill the voices wishes, but those who are susceptible to supernatural influence or for those who use this theory for their own gain, the only idea that is ridicules is the one they do not accept.
This is not a path to a fact or a truth, it is a method of population manipulation using accumulated followers and their wealth to confuse the facts for their own benefit.
It is one thing to have an active hypothesis and to work on it until it finds facts, and quite another to act on a hypothesis and make up the rules as you go along.
After thousands of years and billions of people contemplating for trillions of hours on the same notion and not being able to produce one shred of evidence, one might think that the theory has run its course. With all due respect.
