"I am the mother of a gay son and I've taken enough from you good people."

[ShazzieB]

27. That was completely unnecessary.

"Religion" is a very broad umbrella term that includes an entire universe of incredibly diverse concepts, organizations, beliefs, writings, practices, and people. To call "religion" a sickness implies a condemnation of everything in that vast and diverse universe, and I find that to be unfair and illogical.

It's true that terrible things are done in the name of "religion" every day. There are terrible people everywhere, inside religion, and outside of it, and those terrible people will use any convenient excuse to justify their terribleness. Does that mean every single concept, organization, belief, writing, practice, and person under that umbrella is suffering from a "sickness"? If that's what anyone here believes, I beg to differ.

When I look around me, I see not just evil but also many, many wonderful, loving, kind people in the world, some under the umbrella of religion and some outside of it, doing wonderful things for others and striving to live the best lives they can. For SOME of those people, their religious beliefs (which you call a sickness) are actually a chief motivating factor for their service to others.

Take Jimmy Carter, who most of us here admire greatly. He is a DEEPLY religious man who has made no secret of that fact or of the fact that his faith is an integral part of who he is and a chief source of inspiration for how he lives his life. Does that good, kind, gracious, humble man have a sickness?

Martin Luther King, Jr. was also a deeply religious man, and we all know what he accomplished. The ideas that underlay his actions, especially his belief in nonviolence as the best way to fight the battles he was involved in, were part and parcel of and inexplicably intertwined with his religion. If religion is nothing more than a sickness, then I guess he was sick, too, and everything he accomplished was... in spite of that? I'm pretty sure he would tell us differently if he were around to do so.

I could go on and on, but that would be a waste of my time and everyone else's. The point is, "religion" means a whole universe of different things. It's true that much evil is done under the rubric of "religion," and many evil people use it as an excuse to do evil, but that's far from the whole story. Much good is done under that rubric as well. It doesn't make any more sense to blame religion for every bad thing done by every bad person ever than it does to give it credit for every good thing, and it doesn't make any sense to me to label everything under that rubric as a sickness, either.

I know atheists get a bad rap a lot of the time from religious people who don't understand how someone can possibly be a moral, ethical, upright, decent human without believing in God. I'm not an atheist myself, but I know that's ridiculous, and I think it sucks. I feel more of a kinship with some atheists than I do with some religious people (the Westboro Baptist Church kind, for example), because there are atheists who believe in more of the same things I do than some religious people do. I just don't think it's fair or reasonable to tar everything in the huge, enormous universe that falls under the umbrella of "religion" as a sickness. If that's not what you meant to do, then maybe you should think twice about making such broad and unnuanced statements.