@ Vidiot...
Here's why zealots and religious nutters escalate their violence while the rest of humanity becomes, well...more humane:
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"Men, in order to do evil, must first believe that what they are doing is good." -Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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Perry exemplifies this quite clearly. He'll go along with whatever his god says. What better and easier way can there be to get people to do the most heinous acts against fellow human beings than convince them the orders came from god himself? Or, at the very least, fundamentalists will stand on the sidelines and cheer god on as he works his wickedness.
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To your point, as education levels increase so does competency; more competency means the less a person feels he must childish cling to a skydaddy. A person is then free to allow normal human decency to prevail rather than nodding approvingly at morally offensive ideas simply because their god promotes them. Meanwhile, religion is bogged down in silly tradition and cannot/will not break the inertia of mythical concepts that are well past their expiration date:
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"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent". -Isaac Asimov