I understand your position and your objections and I appreciate the succinct restatement here.
So back to my question from above:
If you were to poll folks on the G&O and simply ask if they feel our faith has made us more evil (given how we have represented that faith to others and of course what they know of us) do you believe the board would agree with your position?
On a sidenote, I wanted to suggest a book you might enjoy written by Paul Copan entitled "Is God A Moral Monster?" (written 3 or 4 years ago). I've discussed Levitical laws of the ancient Israelites and the context therein many times, but I think that book would be a good start to help provide some perspective. You can probably order a copy on Amazon for $10-$11.
You are relying on a logical fallacy, the appeal to popularity. AKA an argumentum ad populum (Latin for "appeal to the people") is a fallacious argument that concludes a proposition to be true because many or most people believe it. In other words, the basic idea of the argument is: "If many believe so, it is so."
The issue is, you support an ideology that is based on ignorance and holds unethical views, and not only that, historically it has been responsible for some pretty serious attrocities. Now a lot of people don't like to support guilt by association, but it can't be avoided. Everyone likes to let groups of the hook and find scapegoats, so if say the Police have a culture problem and they start to resemble organised criminals, they blame a few individuals, they find a scapegoat, but we all know the problem isn't the individual, it's the group, it's the culture. So unless the group changes or becomes extinct, the problem remains, and you can throw out all the so called bad seeds all you like. This is the same with the Church, the culture is bad, the ideologies the group is based on are unsound, you can't fix it, it needs to be scrapped.
Nobody blinks an eye when they say a group of Nazis isn't to be tolerated, no matter how nice a group they are and charitable works they do. This is recognition of the dangerousness of 'groups'. Groups are dangerous because they can so easily scapegoat and blame individuals and the group can carry on with their agendas. Groups need to be held accountable, a bit like in the army, when a soldier fucks up, others in the squadron are punished to encourage them to self regulate and avoid an individual affecting the whole group. If you were punished for the indiscretions of your religion, you would soon stop supporting them if they didn't change their ways.
