OK, so I'm thinking it's time to change the debate subject a little. ***MOD EDIT***
I am a theist, but I am not religious. I am not one of those religion-haters that think religion should be erased from the face of the Earth, but I both understand and can identify with their objection to it, nevertheless. Though it's not because I blame religion for man's inhumanity to man; as that would be stupid. Religion, if it does anything, tries to mitigate man's inhumanity to man, not inflame it. (Though it clearly fails at this in a collective sense.)
My main objection to religion is in the fact that it keeps trying to become "organized" into a one-size-fits-all, top-down, authoritarian, semi-cultist subculture intent on controlling people's thoughts and behaviors instead of helping people individually relate to and express their best selves through the ideology of "God". I'm going to repeat that:
My main objection to religion is in the fact that it keeps trying to become "organized" into a one-size-fits-all, top-down, authoritarian, semi-cultist subculture intent on controlling people's thoughts and behaviors instead of helping people individually relate to and express their best selves through the ideology of "God".
And it's main means of creating this sort of spiritual abomination, as I see it, is organized religions obsession with confusing and conflating faith with belief. Turning what should have been an open-minded and skeptical personal experiment in spiritual practice into a dogmatic mandate from 'on high' that one must follow stupidly and blindly because "God said so". Just writing this hacks me off! Mostly because it's so completely antithetical to the beauty and value of the actual practice of faith at work in our lives. And also of the amazing gifts of imagination and clarification that the mere possibility of a 'God' affords us. All that swept right off the page by organized religion's blind, stupid, authoritarian threats.
No thank you! I'll have none of it. And to those of you who find that sort of thing somehow useful, all I can do is shake my head in mystified confusion.