@theflashfire: But being discriminated against by Atheists is nowhere near as extreme as being discriminated against for being gay, for example. There's a reason the biggest debates in America are about oppressing people, abortion, gay, etc. And it's all religious. It's not extreme religion, it's common place. I mean that's not my view, that's kind of a hard fact.
I feel like your'e confusing religious with social bias that evolved because of religion. See religion is a living and ever evolving thing, meanwhile dogma not always and in fact dogma is often times influenced by outside and often times non-religious sources. For example, look at things that arose in the Catholic faith such as "pardoners, priests and nuns not being allowed to marry, the militarization of the church, christian judgementalisim, guilt, denouncement, etc." the thing is, I can give you scriptures to repute every single one of those things and yet there are tons of Christians (Catholic and Non) that even now still subscribe to such things as they are ingrained into society as much or perhaps more so than they'd ever been ingrained into Christianity itself. What most of Christianity's detractors fail to realize or perhaps acknowledge the better word is that for most of the church's history no one outside of the priesthood was ever allowed to read or understand the scriptures. So for a ton of time the heads of the church had a "You'll have to take our word for it" sort of monopoly going on and this in turn lead to the abuse of power as anyone gaining great power is liable to do. Even worse however is that these abuses of power took on a life of their own as they became "traditions" both for people in the church and then outside of it.
Of course society isn't easily divorced from its past and the Christian church either, seeing as everyone that has a bone to pick with "religion" always trot out these abuses of power without pointing out the context that such abuses were indeed abuses even then and in no way conformed with the tenants of the religion in question in the first place. And also don't get me started on people's use of the word "religion" when only referring to Christianity in its many and varied forms as if all the world has only ever bent a knee to Christ.
All of that however was ranted to say this; unscrupulous people will take advantage were ever they can. In the past that has been the government and the church, the first because of the power and the second because it was hard to separate from the previous at one point. This however doesn't make religion of any stripes better or worst than any organization, because any organization no matter its purpose can be perverted into something self-serving and harmful given time. Looking at the list of oppressing people, abortion, gay marriage, and the like I'd point out that they aren't all religious issues but rather are all issues that can be easily narrated to create villainous caricatures and inflame passions. When people are passionate they are less perceptive and being blind helps people to sneak what they'd like pass you.
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