[TheSollyLama]

well I for one refuse to elevate one fantasy over another. No religion is better than another.
To a one they all serve a purpose incompatible with reason, logic, or for that matter, living in a world where evidence is required.

You can take the words of any religion and find the good, bad and ugly. Old testament says you can rape a child girl and purchase her from her father for 50 pieces of silver, torture your slaves (which of course concedes slavery as perfectly acceptable to begin with).

I don't give a pass to any dark age mythology. If you choose to believe in such horrific fairy tales- fine. Some people believe in Santa Claus well into adulthood. I dismiss them just the same.

It's when you are actually in Israel and see the abuses of an entire people that you really have to give up the false notion that one religion is superior or less hateful and harmful than any other. Been there, seen it.
It's all just a method to oppress someone else and control the herds of slack jawed believers. Look at the history of how Israel became a country.

Terrorism, school bombings, hostages.....everything that the israeli's cry about today and use to justify the oppression of the inhabitants of a land they stole.

In the end, you see the islamic nutjobs and the judaic nutjobs are a match made in.....well you get the point.

And again, I have to disagree, Phil. NO RELIGION fosters critism or critical thinking. In fact religions do quite the opposite. They present a wholly unrealistic set of ridiculous stories and tell people to buy them hook, line, and sinker no matter how ludicrous they are.

It's telling that blind acceptance of the patently absurd is actually considered a virtue among the religious.