Uh huh. The thing is, you're acting as if I'm completely oblivious to all the abuses and atrocities done in the name of religion, to the point where you feel the need to point them out all over again. When I wrote the OP, those were a given. That was the context to which I was responding. I was implicitly acknowledging that yes, religion does a lot of bad things. However, it's inaccurate to say that's the only thing religion does in the world. If you're going to blame religion for the bad things, you must also credit it for the good things.
Yes, but that works both ways, and just acknowledging existence is not enough to make a case that one shouldn't despise it. Unless you do that maths that was mentioned before, it's a non-sequitur.
Yes, it's a given that nobody does only evil stuff or only good stuff. Sticking to one extreme tends not to work even in a D&D campaign, much less in real life. So, yes, you could also find good stuff that Pol Pot or Mao or Vlad The Impaler did. Yet, as I was saying, very few people would say you shouldn't despise Ted Bundy or the KKK just because they did SOME good stuff too. Unless the bad was the only way you could get the good, no, you don't have to take the good with the bad.
And really, the same case as for religion could be made for the KKK. One could equally say that, no, see those who actually lynched blacks are just bad racists, not the good racists in the modern KKK. Or that it gives people a sense of community and purpose. (At least I would assume that having a common cause would provide a sense of community, even if that cause is frothing at the mouth about minorities.) Or that, see, as long as people keep it private, just doing their daily little equivalent of saying grace by swearing at <insert racial slur> at the dinner table, and teaching their children to do so, it's ok, right?
But in practice almost nobody would see it that way. You probably wouldn't think that someone teaching their children that them <insert racial slur> are a bunch of subhuman parasites and shouldn't be here anyway is a good thing. You could probably see how those would then grow up, go out in the world, and make unjust decisions based on that world model that was instilled into their head. You may not outright forbid people to talk racist nonsense in the privacy of their own home, but you wouldn't think I'm that unjustified in looking down upon those who do it, right?
But then comes religion, where damage done RIGHT NOW, not just historically, includes telling a bunch of children that God forbade women to teach, or that girls no longer own their own body once they got pawned off in marriage, or that God hates <insert homophobic slur>, or that blacks are black because some ancestor was cursed by God, or that the bible says you should beat children with rods, etc. I'm not talking 9'th century. There are books published in the 21'th century about how you should beat a baby (who doesn't even actually understand yet what's happening to it, or whether it's done anything wrong) with a piece of plastic tubing, to put the fear of God into him/her early. Etc. But only for religion, I'm supposed to take that as just context, and just mentioning some good stuff is apparently enough to excuse everything else.
Yes, it did some good too, just like the KKK did, and just like Al Capone did too. But is the balance so good as to make it unjustified to despise that Big Book Of Bad Ideas?
You accused me of using the same "propaganda" as religious apologists.
None of that depends on the length of the road or how many u-turns it involved.
The fact is that, yes, most religious apologies (especially by non-professionals, so to speak) work exactly the same. They may or may not start about it being
true but switch track very soon into it being useful and good, and really, any counter-examples don't matter, because that's just a small number of bad Christians, if they're even True Scotsmen... err... True Christians at all.
