Behrou jan, whatever useful religious books have told us, we could have found out by other means. People lived for thousands of years with morals and ethics before these religions came about.
Let's take the question of morality, what the Torat, Bible and Qoran tell us to do with god's mandate:
In judaism, god tell the "chosen people" that you can exactly do what you like to other people: you can enslave them, you can take their women, land and kill their men. You can do all this and more with god's permission.
In the bible slavery is permitted and in fact ordered by god.
In Islam, well, we know too well. Women inherit half what men are entitled to. Infidels must die, but not a virgin woman, because Allah doesn't like it. So virgins are raped first and then murdered. This ritual is performed with god's mandate.
I could go on about these, there are countless wicked things that religion tell us we can legitimately do. How about genital mutilation, or suicide bombing which are entirely religion based.
Many morally decent human beings begin to do the most awful things when they believe in religion. We know this too well from our own country and if anyone still debate this and has't woken up then I am sorry, he/she is one fucking idiot.
Sure, evil happens without religion too. Ordinary faithless people are quite capable of evil and there are many examples of this throughout history. So the question is, if evil is possible without religion but also WITH religion and with the mandate of religion, what do we need religion for? What has it given us in terms of morality that we couldn't reach by ourselves? Any average person with average moral equipment knows what is right and what is wrong. Only sociopaths and pcychopaths believe rape, murder and torture are ok.
On the other hand, it was only through advancement and secularism that we have come to give women the right to vote, we have established the human rights charter under which all human beings are equal, men, women, blacks, ethnic minorities, children have the same rights under the law. These were not achieved through religion. If we were still guided by Bible in the west we would have none of these things. We would have a society like Iran that is based on Islaam and that wicked evil book called Koraan.
That's not at all true Berooz jaan. For all intents and purposes modern humans have been on this planet for at least 50,000 years - meaning for at least that long we've had language and have had to live in small communities/societies with one another and learn to co-operate to survive. You think for the 1st 48,000 years, there were widely circulated copies of modern law and ethics books or people were reading Athenian philosophy on their computers?! Of course not. Certain moral and ethical groundworks were established over time and in various human colonies and passed down orally from generation to generation, until proto-writing and later true writing systems were created.
If you research the topic objectively, you'll notice that where proto-writing and later true writing systems were created, is exactly where these "religous" writings started. Except, that they were not religions, the way you and many others are looking at, rather the written form of the same instructions or moral and ethical groundwork that existed in these various societies. You think someone just sat down 2,700 years ago and dreamt up "thou shalt not kill" in a philosophical breakthrough for mankind? No, that's the instruction that had been passed down for generations in that particular society and as soon as a writing system was available and a medium was created for recording those instructions and those stories (i.e. history) of our ancestors, that's exactly what was done. Had you and I been living in that time period, and I wasn't doing construction on my house and you weren't gardening
we may very well have helped the group that finally collected and recorded these esthical writings!
As the human population grew and the interactions between the various groups increased, each society added their own set of instructions or stories or chose to dismiss certain other instructions or stories from other groups. The further development of these writings can be a very useful tool in tracing the interactions between these societes that were becoming larger all the time and therefore overlapping with one another, and the reasons for accepting or dismissing certain aspects of other societies' teachings can be deducted from studying these books giving a historical account of our ancestor's lives not just for the past 2500 years, but for the past 50,000 years. It's rather unfortunate that the proponents of religion look at these writings as an absolute yes and the opponents look at them as an absolute no. The truth my friend always lies somewhere in between.
Now, in the spirit of finding the truth somewhere in between, you have to study each set of writings with an open mind and understanding that it may very well include adulterated sections. Afterall, they were all written by men (and I don't mean man as in mankind) and mankind is fallible - that's the very essence of every book, isn't it? And keeping in mind that each section of the writing can not contradict the essence of the writing, you can easily tell which sections were adultrated. For example, if you feel that Judaism talks about killing and raping women, that's obviously an incorrect interpretation of a piece of writing that from its very beginning says thou shalt not kill or even earlier than that talks about punishment handed down from "God" to Cain for murder. In fact, the very first story of all the Abrahamic faiths is about the nature of mankind turning it to greed, decpetion and envy and how we lost favor with "God" because of those things. You can not read any further sections of any of these books without first understanding the very essence of the message in its purest form when it was first written down and without any future adulterations. I suspect that you agree that deception, envy, greed are the very problem you have with religion to this day?
How these writings turned into organized religions is not the point of my argument. Organized religions all contradict the very essence of these writings and the concept of "God". My point is that for much of history and for all of pre-history, these are the instructions some of our ancestors lived with. Most of the basic conepts from then (like thou shalt not kill or steal or covet...) are timeless and they're still falling on death ears despite all the great laws and ethics you think we've developed in the last 100 years. Our societies are still driven by greed, envy and all modern human civilizations are still obcessed with creating better weapons to kill. So, as much as you can blame this on religion, you can blame it on human nature. The essence of these writings was to humble mankind and define its role on this planet, a message that is unfortunately falling on as many death ears now as it did then. The issue that I hd with your post is that you said there's nothing meanigful or useful in the Quran - to me that's the exact same argument as every thing in the Quran is meaningful and useful.