So while this conflict is indeed motivated by religious ideology (Zionism included), it's clear that the old saying about all religions being essentially the same is BS. Whether it's militant Islam or Christian Nationalism, what an ideology teaches about violence and power really matters.
Religion tends to be deliberately vague. This lets it adapt to changes over time - it becomes a Rorschach test of the people who choose to follow it. Two people can read the same religious tome and come away with completely different interpretations. People reading it in different ages come away with completely different ideas of what their God was saying (just look at how Christianity has been used to both justify and outlaw slavery for example). It's not so much the ideology as the view of the current practitioners of the ideology that becomes important.
I'm gonna side with
@GuitarStv on this one. "What an ideology teaches about violence and power" seems to be flexible over time. Today's benign congregation doing a cereal drive for hungry kids has a historical tendency to become tomorrow's hotbed of hatred, militarism, and cruelty. I've heard enough of "Islam is peace" or "god is love" from people who represent neither, to see through the charade.
In the US during the 1920s, Christians would get out of church in their Sunday best (after hearing the sermon) and lynch black people.
Their grandparents would get out of church and go mistreat their slaves.
In the 1930s, Nazi theologians such as Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus, Emanuel Hirsch, Siegfried Leffler, and Julius Leutheuser, among many others, and millions of lay people, transformed German Protestant Christianity into the pro-Nazi Deutch Christen movement.
And Pope Pius XII negotiated with Hitler for political gain, while aware of the genocide.
In Croatia during the 1940s, Christian nationalists ran a concentration camp for women devoted to constant rape against Muslims, Jews, and Gypsies.
In the 1930s, Methodists thought dancing was immoral. Now they marry gay couples. What's next is anyone's guess.
In the United State TO THIS DAY, Christians routinely abandon and throw out their own children who are sexual/gender minorities, because that is the fashionable thing to do. Their kids often end up in horrific circumstances, including homelessness, trafficking, and suicide and yet all familial love is cut off.
At my city's Pride parade this year, various Christian denominations were competing to host the best booth and recruit the most LGBTQ people. Meanwhile, other Christian denominations preach sermons about God's urgent directive to oppress, harm, and imprison sexual/gender minorities. They read from the same Bible, which is vague enough to support any position a person prefers. Even when the Bible is 100% clear on something, like not eating shellfish, people can overcome such directives "through faith" and by claiming some other part of the bible nullifies the "old law". I've been to crawfish boils and overheard hateful comments toward LGBTQ people from wealthy religious folks. They weren't just picking crawfish apart, they were cherry picking! And yet what else could they possibly do? The scripture of any successful religion is a mess of contradiction, unclarity, and irreverence.
Perhaps someone could embark on a project to cut all the toxic ideas out of a religion, sort of like what Thomas Jefferson did with the "Jefferson Bible". But what you'd end up with would simply be something that appeals to fewer people, because it would be less morally flexible and less intriguing. The moral relativism is a feature, not a bug. People are seeking relief from the burden of their conscience, not an enhancement of conscience.
All this to say, what matters is the content of the ideology, what's being taught and how it's being lived.
TLDR - Religious or not . . . good people will be good and assholes will be assholes. :P
That said, I'm going to disagree with
@GuitarStv here. Assholes do not simply emerge from the ether as a product of nature; they are typically people who justify themselves with some layer of excuse for their bad behavior. The more a society condones such excuse-making, the more assholes it will endure.
If you point out to an asshole that they're harming people or that their attitude is toxic, they will almost always respond with their very good reason for doing so. Self-centered excuses eventually reveal their pattern, even to the excuse maker. But if the excuse can be a matter of faith, all inquiry and self-accountability end there. When "god demands that we kill the infidels" or "the Bible says I should engage in gay-bashing" or "my attitude toward women is biblical" then the asshole has an excuse that is resistant to all reasoning, and can continue crashing through society with no one able to drag them into self-accountability.
