Having read End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, it seems that Harris is admiring (may not be the word I'm looking for) of Jainism. He seems to think that the practices Jainism prescribes would make war a non-issue. I'd have to agree. However, Harris talks more about putting an end to subscribing in the beliefs of the bible and other "holy" books. Again, I agree with his assessments.

But with the belief system of many people, is Jainism too impractical to try and teach people?

i think the real issue is that people do whatever they want to do and then rationalize their behavior to fit into whatever code of conduct they desire.

Our problems can't be fixed by switching to a grass is greener peaceful religion. At some point, somebody will claim to have a vision or something that says its suddenly ok to be violent towards somebody you don't like.

Surely, there are many christians and muslims and taoists and whatever else who live just and fair lives, they ascribe their virtue as a product of their faith.

Just as suicide bombers, jihadists, the inquisition, the crusades and any other number of terrible behavior has also been rationalized to be perfectly in line with their faith.

I think people have to do away with faith and realize they are responsible for their own actions. When they decide to hate, when they decide to steal, when they decide to murder, it was they who decided it, and it is they who must bear the burden of responsibility.

God can't hate fags. God doesn't exist. Homophobes hate fags. Probably because they sort of feel tingly in the nethers when they think about it, and feel ashamed of themselves.

We would all be better off if everyone realized there is no meta justification for the hatred of any race, religion or gender or sexual preference. Only our own petty, silly, fears and ground in cultureal bias.

Unless I missed something else he said about Jainism, my recollection is that he uses Jains as an example of people who, no matter how strongly they hold their religious beliefs, would not pose a threat to anyone. Their beliefs aren't concerned with making claims about the world that non-believers must be brought to accept. Harris brings them up in order to make the point that relativity is a poor way to look at religions. The attitude that all religions are on equal footing, have more or less the same beliefs, and therefore shouldn't be criticized, is a bad attitude to have, he says. What makes the behavior of Jains so different from that of some Christians and Muslims can be attributed directly to the beliefs of the three religions. There is no other reasonable explanation.

True, we do this, but if you look at the history of religion such as the one outlined by Robert Wright, it seems clear that religion developed as an attempt to restrain individual impulses to do what we want, take what we can get. Then from the very first, some people found a way to manipulate the religion to be more favorable to themselves. But overall, just looking at it from a social control standpoint, we'd have to give religion I suppose some kind of credit for maintaining order. Gradually, this function passed over to secular law. What some people don't like about that situation is that it is so secular, and they want to at least pay lip service to a god in charge. So you have those legislators in Kentucky saying that we should depend on God to protect us from terrorists.

Any time you have folks with "special powers" to access the divine, there's trouble ahead and charlatans in the making. So if any religion is to prevail, it has to be one that's based just on common sense and common morality, such as the golden rule, and it's questionable whether that should be called a religion at all.

I'd be okay with faith simply changing so that the ugly parts were removed, the parts that merely reflect the prejudices of a culture, as you say. Some people who call themselves religious have done a pretty good job of this, so I suppose it could happen on a larger scale.