Well, a lot of that fuzz between Israel and Palestine is the Palestinians want an own nation. But yeah, what their parents taught them about their religion is something that is vividly involved in their doings. But look at the Japanese kamikaze pilots; they were committing suicidal flights just for honor, not because their religion taught them they will have seven hundred virgin maids waiting for them. The wrongdoer or the twisted mind is the people, not the religion. Same with Hitler. Hitler wasn't the sole evil about everything, it was the people bowing to him. Just as if a religion advised to rape kids, the people doing it would be evil, blaming the book would be a bad excuse.
Most religions are created for people to have something to hold onto when there's nothing else left. Religious wars are rare in modern world. Maybe sometimes religions were used for mass control. They were the law book.
I think the important thing about a religion these days is to inject the ethical lesson into the sub-consciousness of a person when he's still child, and to do that you need the symbolism. When the concrete thinking pattern evolves, you either become an atheist, a fundamentalist, don't care thinking about it, or proceed to think symbolically to understand the lesson between the lines.
I think an interest in astronomy and psychology together make religion useless in a way.
