Hamlet had that right.

Clinton, I just can't help it. I've known you for several years now, I now how your mind works, I've seen you dump on way too many people, and I consider you to be a philosophical and spiritual pygmy, although I'm sure you're great at dealing with the practical aspects of life. Everyone has a talent for something.

I have about as much respect for your views as you do for mine, in other words...]

LEJ - Pol Pot was totally against religion. So too was Mao. Were their actions rational and fact-based? Or were they based only on certain selected facts which were used to support their insane rationale?

Facts can as well be used to commit atrocities as other forms of motivational things, such as what you describe as "faith".

And everyone relies on facts when pursuing a plan of action...but WHICH facts? They just ignore the facts that are not sanctioned by their favorite mythology.

Do you think the present mythology of an ever-expanding profit economy being a good thing for the World is based on facts? It is based on a few facts. It ignores a great many other facts. What it is truly based on is greed for money, an artificial item made up by people which everybody agrees to believe in...based entirely on collective faith that it is really worth something. It isn't. People are playing a game they made up in their own heads...exactly what you would accuse religion of doing.

What is the purpose of the game?

The trouble with most organized religions is that the purpose of their game soon changed from developing people's inner spiritual wisdom to enlarging that religion's worldly power base! For their own gain. Same problem as the economy. Same problem as the political world.

Spiritual study does not seek to enlarge a power structure, prosyletize, or convert. It seeks inner peace, brotherhood, compassion, forgiveness, non-violence, self-discipline...self-development in other words.

Religions usually try to build a big outer structure in the World. Spirituality cleans the house within the one person.

wordy - Other people's outer destructive behaviour may indeed be your business. Their beliefs are not. Just like their sex life is not, providing they don't sexually hurt anyone against his or her will. And that, my friend, is why all true democracies guarantee freedom of religion.

Everybody - When ANY religion uses its beliefs to justify an attack, invasion, or in some way a harming of other people...it's using those beliefs wrongly. Ditto for any government, political party, racial group, club, person, business organization, etc. So, why is Dawkins focusing so much on religion? Could it be that he has a personal hangup about it...or has he just not gotten around to investigating similar forms of corruption in other areas of human existence? I wonder...

My guess is, he's got a hangup about it.

In my opinion, there are no bad people. Ain't no such thing. But there certainly are stupid people, ill-informed people, ignorant people, angry people, frightened people, bitter people, fanatical people, and people who are totally confused and have lost their way. And they are all capable of doing very bad things. Some in the name of religion, some in the name of flag and country, some in their own name, period.

Remember: "patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings"

Stalin killed more people than Hitler. Stalin was not into religion. He detested it. Pol Pot killed a bigger percentage of his own country's whole population than anyone else in recorded history. He was totally against organized religion (and most other organized things too). He operated only on quantifiable physical facts in making his decisions. He believed in hard facts. His facts. No amount of "facts" can enlighten a mind that has gone mad and a heart that is functionally dead.