Are all religions equally harmful? (Islam)

[robvalue]

Here's my analysis.

Religions are comprised of oral myths, and optional objects, mainly books. The oral myths are the most important part. Without them, there is no religion. For example, the bible would be meaningless and harmless without the myth that it is "the word of God". It would just be an extremely weird collection of stories, an obvious distortion of what may have originally been some historical accounts, peppered with allegory/fiction.

The problem is that the oral myths can vary wildly over time, even if the books and such stay mostly the same. So saying what the religion "is" becomes tricky. It's kind of like an organism that mutates over time.

For example, say the oral myths of Christianity changed so that the bible was taught to be entirely allegorical, and not any sort of direct message from "God". Then all the evil stuff within would carry far less weight, and the prejudices it suggests would not be so easily adopted.

So how dangerous a religion is really does change over time. I consider any collection of beliefs that attribute arbitrary characteristics and claim knowledge about a possible creator to be equally stupid and unfounded, and all are possibly dangerous if the oral myths carry enough emotional power. But some seem much more likely to tend towards dangerous states than others. With the big two, we have the huge problem of a combination of a vile, disgusting immoral book coupled with the book having divine authority. That's about as bad as it gets, and it's only sane secularism that holds such insanity in check.

So in general, I criticize all religions equally in that they are all baseless, ridiculous and potentially dangerous. They encourage poor thinking and often twisting of morality. But each one is going to present different problems over time, as its oral traditions develop.