Just to beat my head against a wall one more time, yes, bigotry against Islam is racism.

[Humanist_Activist]

144. True, I developed my ethics based on simple things like human rights and fairness...

I also strongly believe that neither ethics nor morality should be set in stone, they need to be pliable to deal with new discoveries and new ideas that can then be applied to them. I find science to be helpful here.

To give an example, new research into animal cognition and animal emotions is helping us create supporting evidence for an actual animal rights movement, even recognition of limited rights that are almost equal to human rights in at least some primate species. Even more interesting, apparently many animals, including primates, elephants, dogs, dolphins, corvids, etc. have a sense of fairness, altruism, selfishness, etc. In other words, it seems that, once a certain intelligence level is reached, morality can develop, and perhaps even complex ethical systems exist in the societies of these animals right now, and we simply haven't recognized them yet.

I do find some trends disturbing though, for example, levels of religiosity(Christianity, mostly) in the United States has a positive correlation with support for torture.

Now, its possible that Christianity just attracts those who like the idea of bad people being tortured, perhaps through the idea of Hell, or it could be reverse, Christianity could make torture more palpable to its believers because of them worshiping a "just" god who also tortures. To be honest, I don't know what influences what in this situation.