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Message: <blockquote data-quote="perfecxionX" data-source="post: 6009227" data-attributes="member: 572854">This is a very poor analogy.  Religious people are making claims about the way the world is and will be.  Claims that are dividing the world into competing religious sects that inevitably clash.  Claims like contraception is sinful, which puts us in a situation where christian ministers in sub-saharan Africa, where 2-3million people die a year from aids, are teaching the evils of condom use where people's only information about condom use is what they hear from the ministers.  Or how about the claims about stem cell research being evil.  Somehow this research that has the promise of curing the scarcely bearably suffering of millions of people is evil because destroying a microscopic cluster of 100 cells is the equivalent of killing a newborn baby.Why is god hiding from us as the wealthy person in your analogy is? Especially when our salvation is dependent on our ability to believe in him?  This seems like a very very strange situation to me, and not descriptive of exactly what i would call a 'just' god.I can make the exact same arguments you are making for my belief in the existence of a celestial teapot.If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.  --Bertrand RussellSo according to you people were completely immoral, murdering and stealing from each other, before Christianity?  That's a laughable proposition.  While Elijah was slaughtering the prophets of baal for their wayward beliefs (so much for religious freedom) in India Mahavira was teaching true doctrines of nonviolence in which it is wrong to kill any living being.  And he did it all without orders from any omniscient dictator.There are obvious evolutionary explanations for why a species as gregarious as our own would develop strong relationship bonds and codes of ethics for how to treat each other.I'm not saying that religion has never done anything good.  One major point though, is that all the good we get from religion can be had WITHOUT religion.Please provide some proof of your claim that 1rst amendment rights were inspired by Christianity.  I think if you look at history you will see that the laws of the christian american colonies(Massachusetts bay colony for example) were quite a bit different than the ones put in our secular constitution a hundred years later.Would rockets be flying into Israel if Judaism and Islam didn't exist?  Would that conflict have ever been able to start up if there weren't these differing religious ideas to separate people?  Happily most Christians are not practicing the religion that there ancestors were just a few hundred years ago.  But their dogmatism is still causing harm (stem cell research, contraception, homosexual bigotry, blocking evolution in schools, etc).  Also, its worth noting that there certainly are still many aggresive and dangerious Christians in the western world (christian dominionists, or christian reconstructionists).</blockquote>

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