I have long been convinced that religion serves largely to justify folks in the pursuit of self-interest. God wants you to have what you want. So going and getting it is good, even if that means killing natives, trading slaves, buying stock in chocolate companies, accumulating wealth while your neighbors suffer, etc etc. The "prosperity preachers" of today are the most obvious symbols of this, but the phenomenon is ubiquitous.

Let's face it, people create God in their own image. Conservative Christians love the death penalty, war in Iraq, discrimination against gays, etc etc etc, and. . . lo and behold, so does God. Conservative Muslims hate America, and . . . so does Allah. Southerners used the biblical "Sons of Ham" (as Neill notes) to justify extreme exploitation of black people. The list is endless.

QUESTION: When has religious conviction ever substantially changed the behavior of a society for the better? When has it ever caused a society to forego empire, conquest, war, even though it believed that such actions would enhance their power? The only place I can think of might be Tibet, which stuck and strikes me as full of people with more than a nominal commitment to sacrificing for principle.

All this talk about Christians being "forgiven" seems to me vapid. Perhaps fogiveness gets you some better treatment in the afterlife (though Christians only pretend to know that) but it sure doesn't seem to make much difference to pre-mortem behavior.

If we could all be atheists we'd start holding ourselves accountable for our actions. That's when moral progress might take off. (Yeah, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc, were atheists, but they were commited to a Higher Ideology of the sort that skeptical thinkers would not be likely to embrace.)

Wow! I didn't mention Amazing Grace in this entire message. Maybe I'm getting over it!

sb