Any clue as to who you are, Guest? Your conciliatory post makes a very good contribution to the conversation.

The truth is that most aspects of religion are benign.

Well I agree with this, to a point. My own Catholic upbringing was relatively benign in many respects. My slide away from conformity met with less resistance than that of some of my friends. I should also confess that I taught for seven years at a Catholic school, I took religious assemblies there and I got married in the Catholic church. I even taught RE in my first two years. The received wisdom of some of our bitter non-atheists here is that I should look back bitterly on that lot as though it was all a massive tragedy. Well it wasn't. It was a stage in my personal evolution (with all that that implies about what I've turned into. Pause for sarcasm...?) However, it isn't as simple as that. First, millions of people on the planet do not get the same opportunity as I had to slip gently away from faith. The Catholic church, as far as I can see, is far from being the worst offender in this regard. To generalise about religion's benign side being pre-eminent is a generalisation way too far for my liking, in spite of there being a lot of truth in it. There are people on this forum who would vigorously defend the way Christianity is presented in the UK who are some of the worst Islamophobes I've ever experienced. Yet they are Christians only by accident of birth, as are those Muslims only Muslims by accident of birth they hate so much. The radar is always set to pick up inconsistencies of that kind. I know from working as a teacher in a predominantly Muslim area of London that youthful rebellion in some devout Muslim families is a very different kettle of fish to similar situations in Christian households. I don't much like the smell of copout that accompanies the defence of how faith is presented to children, considering how it subsequently holds so many of them in lifelong thrall. Finally, yes, the effects of religion can be benign, are possibly mostly benign, as you say. But those are generally positive aspects of life that exist anyway to which faith has simply hitched its wagon. You can, and do, have goodness, consideration, charity and love thy neighbour entirely without faith. Atheism doesn't do quite so well in getting that nice (and generally but not necessarily always benign) sense of community cohesion. We don't have churches and groupings and I feel a bit jealous of that. At the end of it all, we still have to decide whether telling children that myth is truth (lying to them) is, in principle, the right thing to do. The alternative path may look a little rocky, what without those hitched wagons, but perhaps it's a lot fairer to the kids in the long run.