"https://www.britannica.com/topic/nuclear-family"

Oh, so that's what it is. The term was unfamiliar to me, thank you for the information.

"That puts the cart ahead of the horse. And to take the analogy further, if the cart loses a wheel, it's not the fault of the horse that pulls it."

In this analogy - if the horse always chooses to pull a cart designed by someone who designed it badly (which, in this analogy, the designer would be God), one would ask why the horse always chooses that. A bit of a stretch for the analogy, but if advice/rules/teachings of any kind are universally taken the wrong way, it begs the question of whether the advice/rules/teachings themselves are sound or not.

"Or that the teachers of that guidance stink, and that is sometimes a problem in Islam and in nondenomination Christianity, because there's no authoritative heirarchy above the teacher to say to that teacher "Excuse me, but have you lost your mind?"

The "problem" that Islam has in this regard is that there's no central authority. We have certain positions of high respect that one does not ascend to without a large consensus that the candidate is well educated and balanced, and there are several well-accepted schools of interpretation which (largely) concur with one another and which religious rulings are expected to concur, but reality is that any educated cleric can fire off a religious opinion at any time."

Yes, definitely - there is a big problem with this, I agree. I can't entirely agree that education in this context is the same as in other contexts - a person knowing the Quran well is not equal to a person interpreting it correctly, benevolently, or anything else ,though that is not a problem unique to religion, that happens in secular disciplines as well. However, unlike religious contexts, secular disciplines change to try and mitigate that, and ultimately have a central authority to expel or punish those who deliberately lie or mislead - 'educated' religious believers can lie and mislead with near-total impunity.

If anything there is probably very good reason to call many influential Catholics more 'complicit' than other religious believers - they have such a strong central authority that it is difficult for them to argue that changing the interpretation of their religion isn't possible, particularly compared to the rather decentralised nature of Islam and some other religions.

"Theists in general prefer not to accuse others of heresy. In Christianity, the general thought since the Reformation has been that it's God's business to determine who is a heretic and who isn't. And in Islam, it's even more complicated. :-)

But, in general, I'd agree. The reticence to hold other believers accountable for variant beliefs has let to many difficulties over time."

I think this is half true, in a sense. In terms of say, religious debate, they certainly prefer less to accuse others of heresy, but when it comes to e.g. judging individual followers, they do it indirectly. Most who get shunned for not following the religion or "following it in the wrong way" face worse things than accusations of heresy, they're legally locked out of things by religious believers (e.g. American abortion law right now), even in economically advanced nations like America or Saudi Arabia.

Either way, I agree with the other part. Easily my biggest criticism of organised/collective religion - whether it has a central authority or not - is the silence of most religious people to atrocities committed by their religion that don't look bad enough. If a person blows up a plane or attacks a building, religious believers leap to criticise them, but if hardliners outlaw a sexuality or practice for an entire country (even in a manner most believers don't agree with), no dissenting voices appear. Of course, this PR-oriented approach isn't something unique to organised religion, but at least in other quarters there is a hope to change the rules that allowed the atrocity.

It reminds me very distinctly of Martin Niemoller's poetry on the silence of many groups against the Nazis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...