In my opinion an incorrect belief about God causes the most problems. If there is no God than all things are permissible and if it is a god of our own making (false religion) then that god will justify what ever we want. No matter what side of the horse we fall off of we end up in the same place, all things are permissible, even a sense of superiority. One just has a second level of false authority, our god said it was okay or we are better than them because we follow the right god.

A correct theology always leads to a correct anthropology, distort the one and you distort the other. A correct theology naturally leads to the conclusion that " all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

It's hard to find a justification for personal superiority in those words because those rights were properly grounded in their true source. And those rights give no room to treat your neighbor unjustly. But what would happen to those rights if you removed the source or replaced it with another source? your rights would vanish and all things would become permissible. Well almost, we are moral absolutist when we are the victim and moral relativist when we are the perpetrator. But a God who holds us accountable is something we most certainly don't want because He always gets in the way of what we want. Because correct theology also leads to correct conduct.

"Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world." James 1:27