As all the mainstream religions claim to promote love and respect...

Is that true? I don't see any evidence of it - certainly not in 6,000 years of the Abrahamic Tradition in which Man creates God in his very worst possible own image then goes ahead and imitates him :   

"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser, a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." — Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion)

*

Love & Respect are human qualities adopted & perverted by religion into something quite evidently meaningless. In real life they exist on a very personal / familial level, they keep things in the balance within the community, however so perilously. But things is mostly good. Religion is made up by misfits and misanthropic outsiders who have failed to fit in to this. It is born of envy and deep seated resentment of misanthropic fuckwits (Old Testament Prophets, Saint Paul et al) who want to pour down Judgement on Humanity for simply Having Fun, because they don't know how to. The Bible is nothing but a relentless catalogue of psychotic misery written, and perpetuated, by a bunch of sad lonely kill joys. They made God in their image - but God died at some point when the concept proved incompatible with the emergent reality that things ain't so bad after all & people stopped going to church because they had better stuff to do.   

In this Post-Religious age, no one knows this more than those who claim to believe. Religion now exists as a sort of Heritage Industry-cum-Revival Folklore. On that level it's not without interest - things like the Thurible at the cathedral at Santiago de Compostella, or the doorway of same (which I've only seen in plaster cast at the V&A) inspire a certain Fortean fascination - but to think that the innocent & wondrous minds of children are still being messed up with the notion that this demonic medieval Idiot God is somehow real (and that he loves them so much he'll send them to hell if they don't do as he says) is one of the more depressing realities of life in the early 21st Century.

Anyhoo - here's a song to cheer the hearts of Militant Atheists everywhere. Remember, we are only Militant because we love the Light of Common Human Reality and want everyone to share in it as is our common right & privilege. Religion exists solely to deny that right, and that reality; as long as it does so then Atheism, and Atheists, will remain Militant.

Linton Kwesi Johnson - Reality Poem