Simple answer...they are all made up.

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Fester from Detroit, Mi

The answer is simple, the adherents of the religion.

Always.

People screw it up by ignoring the best parts and using the worst parts to benefit themselves.

You can be a Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, whatever.....and choose to not be a dick.

If you’re talking about a philosophical flaw in logic, well, most religions hinge on some concept of faith or belief. So, you can choose to believe without thinking Jesus rode a Velociraptor to synagogue.

i think this is interesting to me.

first, we end up with the worst of both worlds when we say that religion's "flaw" is that it's not scientifically rigorous enough. faith is a fundamentally different way of knowing. science can't tell you how to be a good neighbor and religion can't tell you how to calculate the area under a curve. fine - horses for courses.

but to your second point, i think this is something that christopher hitchens was fond of bringing up in arguments about atheist morality. in response to the argument that you can't have morality without religion, he used to say, "name one ethical action performed by a believer that could not have been performed by an atheist." And, its converse, name one unethical thing justified by belief in god that can't be justified by atheism. (or some such.) "the suicide bombing community, and the genital mutilation community," he used to say, "are entirely faith-based."

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https://lshtm.academia.edu/MikeCallaghan

http://howtobeswiss.blogspot.ch/

Ethical actions performed by believers and non-believers alike are motived by "ought" considerations. Which are metaphysical. Take climate change for instance. The world is warming and the people who say we ought to do something about it are making a metaphysical statement. The more passionate they are about it the more they are like religious people. Why should I change my way of living for the sake of people who are not yet born or people with whom I have no relationship? If someone says I don't care about climate change because I would rather pursue my own interest logic doesn't get you very far. You can say they are assholes but that isn't a logical argument. If I want to do well personally I may well be better off building a moat where it (climate change) will not affect me personally. So yes both groups can perform ethical actions but the motivation seems to be some sense of universal morality or obligation to others which looks very metaphysical.

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They constantly try to escape from the darkness outside and within
Dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good T.S. Eliot

That's great that you found a way to do good for your community.

And don't confuse trust in the scientific method based on hundreds of thousands of reproducible experiments with "faith" that requires belief specifically in the absence of evidence. Trust based on evidence and faith based on the lack of evidence are not the same thing.

Criticism is part of the way to understanding. There are many reasons why religions do not convince many people of their validity. Parsing those reasons helps gain additional insights into why we believe what we believe.

The idea that "most folks who dislike the realms of spirituality believe they are the highest power" is myopic, narrow minded, uninformed, and offensive. Speaking only for myself, I don't "dislike" the realms of spirituality; I see no evidence they exist. If I see convincing evidence, then I'm on board. It has nothing to do with what I want to see or don't want to see - evidence is what matters. Otherwise, you believe things because you want to believe them, and that's the definition of faith.

And as to what I'd like to be true - I can say unequivocally that I want it to be true that in order to gain eternal, everlasting, infinite happiness for myself, my children, my friends, my loved ones, all we have to do is believe in Jesus for a tiny century or so. That is an insanely immense gain for nothing more than a change of mind (putting aside the issue that you can't choose what you believe). I absolutely want that to be true. Why would I not? And yet, as much as I want it to be true, that doesn't make it true.

But you're making a false analogy here. You're saying science can't tell you how to be a good neighbor, but faith somehow does. Does it? Or do we take the creeds spelled out in our professed religion and filter than through our own morality? Why don't we stone adulterous women anymore? Did the religious text change or did our morality change, so we ignore that part? Why do we call slavery evil even though the Bible clearly spells out how to own another person? I think we far more often use religion to reinforce our own opinions than vice versa.

And I'd debate that reason can't tell us how to be a good neighbor.

The is/ought divide is extremely interesting, but there is a single instance where you can get from an is to ought, and from there every other ought stems: human wellbeing. Clearly, there are things we can do that affect human wellbeing. Clearly, we also have empathy. If we do something that affects someone else negatively, we feel some semblance of that pain. If we don't want to feel that pain, we "ought" not to inflict pain. Empathy makes perfect sense in an social creature's evolutionary development, so it's not a stretch to say that what "is" (hurting people makes you hurt) can lead to an "ought" (if you don't want to feel empathetic pain, don't inflict pain). From that point, all other oughts flow.

This also means there needs to be nothing metaphysical about a sense of universal morality. It makes perfect sense that it would have socio-biological roots.

Because choosing your actions based on the way they will effect others is what morality is. Theres a school of thought that does say what is in your best interest is what it's moral for tou, but its easy to see how that doesn't really work for any society of more thsn once person. Persons not yet being born isn't really a good argument, and Derek Parfit addresses this in Reasons and Persons. No idea who the author of this piece is but she does a good job briefly explaining moral obligations to future generations here http://folk.uio.no/...re%20Generations.htm . In short, we do, but the reason for that being the case is way more complicated than any reasoning from religion, which is mostly based on decrees from God (10 commandments, etc) rather than logic. Logic gets you all the way there, it's religion that requires your reasoning to take a backseat and accept moral rules that don't have independent justification. Religion has the advantage to most people of being easy to digest, where true ethics is incredibly complicated and messy. Most people have no interest in reading ethical theory snd coming to their own conclusions, especially when someone will tell them what they need ro know every Sunday morning.

But that's not always true. Often times we hurt people and have no idea we have hurt them - is that not still causing others pain? And we sometimes feel empathy when no real harm was caused. Racists don't feel empathy for hurting others of a race they deem less than, is that moral? Not to mention the small subset of the population that does not feel empathy for anything. It also rests on the desire to not feel pain, which is by far the most common, but not universal - ask your local dominatrix. You can't get from an 'is' to an 'ought' in any way I'm aware of. It was interesting to think about at least!

Obviously, it's human nature and thus complex. Tribalism is also a human trait that affects empathy, which is why the Nazis called Jews non-humans to make it easier to be inhumane to them. But the more we identify with another person, the more empathy we feel toward them, and the less we want to see them in pain.

The is/ought debate is very interesting, and for the most part I'm convinced you can't bridge the two, but I heard a number of debates outlining the idea of empathy being a basis for bridging one is/ought, and it I think there's a lot of validity in it. If your goal is to not feel empathetic pain, then you ought not cause pain in others.

Sideways wrote:

Simple answer...they are all made up.

Except for Crom, the God of the Cimmerians.

He's real because this is so awesome!

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Remember - It's important to be comfortable in your own skin... because it turns out society frowns on wearing other people's

Biggest flaw? the faithful engage in willful ignorance and active self deception.

my favorite quote on (at least catholic church) is by Dan Savage - If kids got raped at Denny's as often as they get raped at church every Denny's in the US would be burned to the ground.

The failure to recognize the limits of applicability.
(This is often a failure of science also).

I think this thread focused on the obvious fundamental flaws and didn't touch the specific flaws of any given major religion. Even if all are based on bullshit, there can still be bullshit that is more or less harmful to humanity.