That may have been me, I still have the conversation thanks to this new site. I wasn't the one who instigated it either. The initial conversation was in a thread of which I don't remember much. And I've already heard that reply/explanation so many times. It doesn't change across many of the various sub-context interpretations of the same belief system. If you believe something, that's fair enough. If you wish to hold it close to you, I have no problem with that unless you're using it as an excuse to be a prick. What I [b]don't[/b] like is when people start preaching to or pushing their beliefs upon other people. There's no need for it and all it does is cause friction and unease. If I know what religion you follow from any other way than visual cues or other people, you're probably talking about it more than you should be. I do have my own beliefs, and they aren't encompassed by the simple labels of "atheist" or "religious". Does anyone know what they are? -blam!- no, because I understand that they're MY personal beliefs and until asked, I won't even [i]consider[/i] talking about them because, you know, NOBODY ELSE NEEDS TO KNOW. The problem with the "But a lot of *certain religious people* are nice people. It's just the extremists that are like that" excuse causes issues too. The more you allow people to practice their own hateful or damaging version of beliefs under the title of a certain religion, the harder it is to distance the two and separate the dangerous ones from the inert ones. The saturation of "good" practitioners amongst the community essentially defends the beliefs of the extremists. THAT is what is so damaging about such a widespread and self protected religion under a single label, even if their beliefs differ greatly. We’ve heard it a million times: “The version of religion you criticize is a fringe minority. It’s not representative of the whole. Christianity is not the Westboro Baptist Church, Judaism is not the orthodox hassidim who insist that women sit at the back of their buses in Brooklyn, and Islam is not the terrorists and the men who stone women to death for daring to regard themselves as anything other than a shameful second class citizen/object whose only desire should be to please the man who owns her.” So say I’ve got myself a machine gun. Don’t laugh. British transsexual women can have imaginary machine guns too. Now let’s say I fire my imaginary machine gun into a small cluster of lizardmen. Let’s say out of the two dozen imaginary bullets I fire, fourteen miss. Were those bullets any less lethal than the ones that hit their mark? Ridiculous and violent metaphor? You bet! But bear with me. Sometimes we get lucky. Sometimes religious beliefs end up manifesting amongst people who are kind and decent. But the kindness and decency is not necessarily resultant from the religion, and while it mitigates the danger of the religious belief it doesn’t necessarily make that belief any less dangerous in and of itself. The fact that religion often fails to manifest as violence does not in any way detract from the underlying potential it carries for violence. Religion doesn’t necessarily make a good person any more good, but it can make a dangerous person a lot more dangerous by giving them conviction, certainty, and an excuse. Let’s say we have 100 believers, and 99 of them are people with enough compassion, empathy, common sense, and understanding of consequences to not take the passages in their spiritual texts about stoning adulterers seriously. One of them has genuinely hostile misogynist attitudes, and extremely violent feelings towards his ex-wife who cheated on him. He himself may not necessarily act on those attitudes, but this holy book of his tells him it’s okay, and his faith in God, armored from criticism, in which the intellectual brake lines have been cut, gives him all the rationalizations he could ever need. Meanwhile, his congregation, the 99 fellow believers who would never dream of capital punishment for adultery, egg him on in his faith and his belief and his adherence to the holy book. They thereby maintain the mentalities that though for them (luckily, incidentally) are not dangerous are for him a ticking time bomb. They not only maintain it, they fuel and celebrate it. Spurned on by his faith, which he uses to excuse his hatred of his ex, he one day murders her, permitting and forgiving himself by believing it had been the will of his God. The 99 believers say “it wasn’t us! It’s not our fault! We’re not ALL like that!” But it was them, too. They collectively participated in the conditions that allowed the crime to occur. There is harm in the absence of critical thought, though it doesn’t always manifest everywhere this absence occurs. There is harm in ideology. There is a dangerous potential for violence in every religion… which is often only a potential, except when it’s not.