Joe, you have my sympathetic and affectionate respect. Some folks get weary of being handed prefabricated ideas, backe dup by organization, and it is often a long haul to find the light behind those ideas in their original form. So I submit the real argument you will hear from the various freethinkers on this forum is not against religion as such, but against its abuses by those who have used it as a screen, for whatever reason. From small to large, amongst all the True Believers of all the sects and groups and churches and cults who have unconscientiously borrowed others' words to stand for them, these abuses are legion.

Y'know that story of the man who was strolling down the road with Satan one day and they saw, way up ahead of them down the road, another man lean over and pick something up and put it in his pocket. Old Scratch started in laughing madly, and when the man with him asked him what was so funny, he explained that the distant pedestrian had just discovered Truth.

"Well, dammit, Scratch," said the man. "Why should that make you happy? You do all your business on the opposite!!"

"Sure," was the reply. "But I'm going to help him ORGANIZE it!!"

Regards,

Amos