Greyhome, do you realize that this thread makes you look like an anti-religion bigot? Often in this thread you've pointed to various things (Crusades, slave trade, oppresion, etc.), but many of your claims are AT BEST relevant only to some particular sub-group.
The doctrine that blacks aren't human, which was used to justify slavery? You won't find this in the Bible, and by the time of the Civil War you wouldn't find this in Northern churches, either. This was a standard case of denial: the people in question didn't want to reexamine things, so they created a fiction to support their actions. Among other things, if they hadn't done this then they would have had to reconcile their treatment of their slaves with the behavior dictated by the Bible: because it didn't match.
Crusades: the Christianity spoken of in the Bible is quite frankly pacifist, the "war" is a metaphorical war, not a physical one. The "warrior" is supposed to go out and evangelize, not shed blood. So... how Christian were the Crusades? As with many things done by religious authorities during the Medieval period, the Crusades were more related to governmental power than to religious morality.
Transexuals are a bit different from those other two: that's a subject to avoid. After all, they are
definitively (no, really, unless they undergo modification they are almost all fertile as their physical gender) of gender A, yet consider themselves to be an example of gender B. So, they're crazy in the same way that people who believe themselves to literally be tigers are crazy, right? But at the same time they aren't harmful to society, and are
fully capable of recognizing the presence, origin, and nature of their physical reality/self identity dichotomy, so they aren't crazy, right? There simply is no good answer. Regardless, if you haven't explored the realms of psychology & such, the inherent dichotomy posed by transexuals is a perfectly understandable reason to find them disturbing, because they
claim X, yet simple observation establishes
Y (I actually suspect that the implementation of Christian opposition to both transexuals and homosexuals probably originated as a reaction to Roman persecution of Christianity, but that's another matter).
Some of your points are in some way or another in accordance with the Abrahimic religions, and against others more counters could be made, but I simply want you to think more on the subject, so I'll stop here.
As for the things you stated that actually have no tie to religion...
Are we in accordance that baboons probably don't have religion? And thus that baboon behavior could possibly shed some light on human behavior in the absence of religion? Here's a link: (
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/13/scien ... lture.html). To summarize, the alphas died off (all of them), and the troop calmed down. New members have been trained to be calm ever since. How is this relevant? The worst human behaviors throughout history have almost always been manifested in "alpha behaviors"; with humans, the identity of the "alphas" varies constantly (one minute the baron, the next the serf), but "alphaness" is primarily testosteronal in nature, and thereby varies in accordance to current thoughts and behaviors.
Similarly, elephants display such societal adaptation, as demonstrated by the
famous elephant slaughter of rhinos.
And finally, violence:
we're starting to suspect that it's infectious, rather like memes from Orion's Arm.
So, for all of the things that are NOT related to the religion of those who performed them, and in fact for the origin and thereby ACTUAL nature of those that developed within a particular group but were not rooted in previously existing religious precepts, we have not religion to blame, but instead the existence of society. As has been stated to you, most of these things are NOT validly blamed on religion, and will just as likely happen in the absence of religion as in it's presence.
Incidentally, your point about prosperity vs religion? You got the relationship wrong. Religion falls
after prosperity rises in most nations, NOT before. Rather than the two being mutually discouraging, or of religion preventing "advancement", the lack of prosperity causes a reduction of emotional investment in existence, and an increase of emotional investment in something else (religion, progress, science, whatever someone can find meaning in).