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Originally Posted by MarchHare
Oh wow...that's a topic for a whole other thread, but surely you can't possibly be so naive that you're unaware of all the terrible crimes that have been and continue to be committed because of religion.
I would say it's a relatively sizable number of people who were motivated because of their religious beliefs who have been responsable for a great deal of evil, misery, and suffering throughout human history. Hitchens and Dawkins (among others) have both discussed this in much greater length than I will go into here.
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I totally know about the Inquisition, anti-Semitism, and the abuse of homosexuals that has occured at the hands of those who call themselves religious. Certainly a lot bad things have been done in the name God or gods. However, to assume that you have some sort of Divine scale that can come out with some solution as to the absolute effect of religion on a spectrum is ridiculous.
Hitchens devotes a little over 300 pages to his dogmatic attack on religion. The Judeo-Christian tradition stretches 1000s of years and countless acts of goodness have been done in the names of their beliefs. Don't you count those?