Steve, you said: "We'll go over the tired old ground, old fruit, as many times as it takes in order for religious proselytisers to realise they don't have a God-given right to do whatever they like to their kids unchallenged."

For sure! I have no real disagreement with you there. In fact, I am just as concerned as you are about parents spoonfeeding unrealistic ideas to their children, and I think those ideas should be challenged. The saving grace to that is that most adolescents go through a period of several years when they DO challenge almost everything their parents told them...and that's the age when most young people tend to at least temporarily reject organized religion.

The only real disagreement we have, I think, is this: You look at religion and you seem to see only BAD stuff. I look at religion and I see some bad stuff...and some good stuff...plenty of both, in fact...and it's the good stuff I'm mainly interested in. What's the proportion of bad stuff to good stuff? Well, that depends on which particular group of religious people you focus on...and it can vary wildly from 50/50 to 10/90 to 40/60 or any other ratio one could possibly care to mention.

As with politics, when dealing with religions you have to find a group or a philosophy whose ideas mesh positively with your own, and you have to work with the positive side of it if you want something positive to happen.

I am just as aware of the excesses and mistakes in religion as you are, Steve...and I oppose them just as you do...but I don't imagine that there's nothing BUT bad things to be found in religion.