re: #295 SidewaysQuark

It’s only a handful of extremists who are responsible for terrorism, but if you think it’s only a “handful of extremists” responsible for the backward social and legal policies spanning from Libya to Bangladesh, then you are sadly, sadly mistaken.

Of course, only Islam seems to gets the voracious defense to criticism of religion on this site. (It must be that “magical balance fairy” everyone talks about, that automatically requires all religions to be equal in outcome and results.)

The world is basically religious, atheists being a rather small minority. So there is no observable evidence to support a simple-minded “atheism good, religion bad” viewpoint.

There is also no evidence for an equally simple-minded “religion X good, religion Y bad” viewpoint, as long as X and Y aren’t ridiculous death cult outliers. History shows that the relative levels of civilization in regions dominated by different religions varies over time very significantly. This observation is fatal to theories based on inherent properties of religions making them somehow better/worse.