Thanks for the link Alice, and the reminder about BS, Harpgirl! As for songs, Paddymac, Tom Lehrer's Vatican Rag comes to mind. And Dogma manages to be a hilarious film without offending Christians, as far as I know.

Good point about changing emphasis on the nature of Jesus, Jim Dixon - but it goes a little farther than you said. The "king of the Jews" bit (which seems closest to the historical Jesus)
had to be played down, for the religion to survive under Roman occupancy. TThe idea of Jesus as Messiah only got going in that period (35-70CE). Hence little fictions like Pontius Pilate handing Jesus over to the Jews. (Cucifixion was an exclusively Roman punishment; Jews had their own methods, including stoning.)

Jon's "fat Americans" point often is disingenuous. What was ever done collectively in the name of fat Americans? And if anything ever was, they could have disowned it, just as Christians could condemn the abuses of their churches if they had the guts. As Edmund Burke siad: "For evil to prevail, it is necessary only that good men do nothing." (Why should that bring the words "Pope Pius XII" and "Holocaust" to mind?)

Christianity deserves all the stick it gets, having been far the most persecuting religion. It would not have survived at all, except that in 315CE Constantine adopted it as the Roman state religion, to help consolidate the power of the empire. The arrogance this bred in Christians resulted in brutal intolerance of other faiths, notably Muslim and Jewish.

As well as the books mentioned by Jim, try "Religion and the Rise of Capitalism" by C L Tawney, and it becomes obvious, if it wassn't already, that God is a human invention, to facilitate the manipulation of other humans.

Does anyone still believe that he is up there, watching over the life forms on prehaps thousands of planets, deciding our individual exam results on the basis of who flatters him most and lights most candles ("pp" mmeaning "publication promised" in those tragic classified ads), and deciding which of us gets to heaven and which don't? If there really is some guy doing that all day, it's a pity he hasn't got a dad who could drive him out the house to get a proper job.