>>32
I am just not confident in the assessment made by these Dawkinite atheists about the impact of religious beliefs on people's behavior.
use the god excuse to justify or exacerbate your actions
One minute someone could use god as an excuse for their behavior, another they could claim they're doing it to create a utopia, just because something fits the evidence doesn't mean it is necessarily the truth, you have to use deduction to narrow down the possibilities and gain a more accurate view of the situation or you're just speculating.
More likely theism and crime have poverty in common, as a shared cause, people in desperate poverty are more likely to be driven to crime and fall to their knees and pray. I'm sure there are instances where theism can be connected to crime, like most things though there are a wide range of factors at play and more than one reason why someone might do something, the correlation with poverty is just far stronger.
Perhaps if poverty was factored out we could see more clearly the relationship between theism and unethical behavior, I've never met a Dawkinite who has reached this far down the reasoning process though.