Hi Tetrapod,
I'm glad you replied. I thought you might appreciate the invitation to state and explain your point of view, but I was beginning to think that this question of a somewhat personal nature may have killed the thread.
Looks like you would agree with a bumper sticker I saw recently that said something like "Atheism stops religious terrorism."
No question there have been problems with religions historically. I may come back with a more detailed answer, but I think the fundamental problem occurs when there is too much man and not enough God. What I mean is that God becomes the servant, not the master. People may think they have God as the master, but not really. Now I know I should qualify that, and if the interest is there, I may try that on a later post in this thread.
Here's just a little bit of biography so you understand where I come from on this. First of all, I did not come out of a JW background in any way (sometimes I don't feel right about being at JWD). My father did not openly deny God, but I never saw anything that affirmed God either. My mother came from a staid, old German Lutheran background. She was saintly and patient, but not assertive. She also read horoscopes and Jean Dixon. Although my mother attended church and I was taken to Sunday School, it wasn't every week. There was never any pressure on me to conform to any kind of doctrine, or achieve anything in the church. I didn't grow up under the cloud of anything being expected of me in this area. My friends weren't Christians, and I didn't have the influence of Christian teachers or mentors. My chief interest was science, but I later studied some philosophy, psychology, and eastern religion. In short, there was nothing in my childhood that pushed me into Christianity. I grew up in an environment as close to neutral as one can get, with some exposure but no pressure. By all indicators, I should have become an atheist, but I didn't. So, as I tried to stress earlier, we aren't always aware of why we decide what we do, but information in itself is not the key factor.
As a Christian, I know the good it has done me and I've seen the good that true faith has done for individuals, and that's what I look at. Help on an individual level, and if enough individuals find and live out this faith, change occurs in the larger social units.