Ron, I think you could find people in ANY religion who use their religion in a lazy, unthinking way, so as to narrow their minds...and other people in the same religion who use it in a very creative way that expands their minds. Agreed?

I am not attempting to condemn the religions themselves, holus-bolus, I am expressing a concern about the misuse of religions by some (perhaps many) of the people IN those religions.

Maybe you're finding offence in the things I say because you have already decided it must be there...and so you are looking for it. One does tend to find what one looks for...

Why assume that I am speaking about ALL the members of a religion when I say any of the things you quoted me saying? I am NOT speaking about ALL of them. I might be speaking about 20% of them...or 50%...or 10%...or 5%. I am speaking STRICTLY about the people whom I see not using their religion in an intelligent way...and ONLY about those people. Would you agree that there are some such people in any given religion?

If so, then we are on common ground.

If you want me to somehow become totally inoffensive to everybody and never say anything that might somehow cause offence to someone here, there's only one way. I log off Mudcat permanently and never say anything again about anything on this forum.

That would make Clinton Mammond happy. ;-) But I'm not going to do it. ;-) Not yet anyway. When I finally get totally, absolutely bored and fed up with this place, with people's defensiveness, hangups, hypersensitivity, and plain narrow-mindedness, then I'll log off, and seriously, that could happen anytime at this point.

As Bob Dylan said once to Joan Baez, I'm really getting "sick of all this repetition".