Dwalin2011, you miss my points entirely. I'm not saying followers of religions are all bad people. I said I question the legitimacy of religious people's beliefs. I say religion is a bad influence by itself. It seems its vices are more than its benefits these days. You can't blame a person for picking up a holy book and take its meaning literally. But you can blame the book and question its divinity, which is what I'm doing.
Well, my point of view is the opposite: I think that religion by itself isn't bad, but can be used for very bad purposes by people who have their own free will but often justify their behavior by following the religious doctrine.
To be clearer, I have the same opinion about many political ideologies: while introduced for good purposes, specific people turned it into an instrument of evil. Look at Stalin and what he did to communism.
