When religious people do bad things in the name of religion...

[Htom Sirveaux]

19. Upon reading the full article...

She agrees that non-religious things can be non-verifiable:

Let me make a comparison to show my point. Let's compare religious belief with political ideology. After all, religion isn't the only belief that's armored against criticism, questioning, and self- correction. Religion isn't the only belief that leads people to ignore evidence in favor of their settled opinion. And contrary to the popular atheist saying, religion is not the only belief that inspires good people to do evil things. Political ideology can do all that quite nicely. People have committed horrors to perpetuate Communism: an ideology many of those people sincerely believed was best. And horrors were committed by Americans in the last Bush administration... in the name of democracy and freedom.

So why is religion so unique? Because it, among all other non-veriable things, does not yield to experience:

So with religion, even if God's rules and promises aren't working out, followers still follow them... because the ultimate judge and judgment are invisible. There is no pudding, no proof -- and no expectation that there should be any. And there is therefore no reality check, no self-correction, when religion starts to go to the bad place.

So if everything she's saying is true, we should expect religious opinions to be unchangable, invulnerable to experience. Except that they aren't. People change religious opinions all the time, especially in response to experience. That's what gay people coming out, for example, was all about. That once religious people really knew gay people, they would rethink what God's response to them would be. And it has worked and is working. Even among "born agains":

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So Greta Christina is empirically wrong about this one. Unless, once again, one begs the question by pre-defining the essence of religion as "having no reality check".