That's what criticism of religion is:

It took us centuries of battles between dissenters and established religion, and the stages with which it was symbiotically entwined, to win the rights that the short-memoried invertebrate liberals now cravenly surrender!

The secular and social rights we have, the freedom from power-inflated superstitions armed to the teeth with the coercive power of a state, the right to think for ourselves and express our thoughts — all these we owe to the heretics who risked and often lost their lives in the struggle to let non-clerics read what they thought was the word of God, the Bible, and construe it for themselves in their own way.

The translator of the Bible whose work was the main basis of the King James version, William Tyndale, was in the early 16th century part of a free-thinking religious underground: he was kidnapped by Papal agents and burned at the stake. In 1880s Britain Charles Bradlaugh had to win four elections in succession before he gained the right for elected atheists to sit in the House of Commons as MPs without first hypocritically taking a religious oath. There were many many battles in between Tundale and Bradlaugh - and afterwards too. All that is being betrayed and prostituted by those who meekly accept the diktats of medievalist-minded political Islam. So are all those who now fight an equivalent battle for the same rights in Muslim countries.

Just shows that Marx wasn't always wrong. Go and read.

Bit hard for Tyndale to have been kidnapped and executed by papal agents given that he was arrested by Henry VIII in 1534 and executed in 1536, both events taking place after the English break with Rome.

Paul stole my thunder.

Many things have been done in the name of religions and their Gods. Some of them awful and grisly.

The major part of the current state of world politics hinges on religious differences. But many people pass off the present barbarism because it is primarily aimed from east to west. I cannot figure how Moslems killing Jews and Christians in the name of Allah, is any different than Catholic Inquisitors killing Jews. Nor is it any different than Catholics killing Protestants or Protestants killing Catholics. Religious fanaticism is religious fanaticism regardless of the killers or the killed.

But we don't have just criticism now. No the current problem in the U.S. is not the criticism of religion at all. It is the attempted annihilation of religion. (Unless of course you attend a black church in Harlem frequented by Al Gore or others of the liberati.)

Should we have prayer in public schools? I vote yes, so long as that prayer is not mandatory and you get to choose whether the God(s) is/are one(s) you want to worship. We should also be allowed to have a Nativity Scene on the courthouse lawn, between the Menorah and the Kwanzaa decorations.

But we can't. Because some people can't just criticize religion, they must attack it. We have a freedom of religion, not freedom from religion in the U.S. It amazes me how few people can discern the difference.

Something that is said repetitively (spelling?) is that the success of judaism, and christianity in terms of their ability to accept, and develop modern concepts is not built on their successes as a religion, but rather on the fact that mythological dogma had been fought back, and defeated in the hopes of finding a religious purity, that allows for a purity of truth in science.

Many great scientists were extra-ordinarily religious, they just thought that the wrong people were in charge of dictating what WAS religion. Einstein and Newton both have statements that speak against the powerstructure of religion, based on the truths they could expose. That isn't counter to a belief in god, or an ignorance of faith but rather an honest effort to touch god, not be god. They saw the rules of the universe and tried to understand as much as they could, because clearly it was god who made those rules, and I think that that faith drove them more than anything, because nothing is more beautiful for a believer (of which I am not one) than to find yourself as close to god as all.

Islam, never failed in the lifetime of their proffit, so there is no reason to strive for god, just to submit to the perfect image of islam as it was under mohammed.

Faith isn't a bad thing, it's only bad depending on what faith you follow, and how you follow it.

Speaking of boycotts a Catholic bishop in New Zealand calls for a boycott of South Park and ratings go up six times.