I haven't seen a single post here, or sentiment expressed to the effect, that all religion "should be abolished."

The religious symbolism I see all around can be annoying, though I have no right not to be annoyed. Much of it is of poor or no artistic quality. I've been to Italy, the (non-human) love of my life, twice this year. I am a Dawkinsite atheist but I spend most of my Italy culture-time actually seeking out religious symbolism, hoping always to find it expressed in the highest artistic form. I spent hours in the Uffizi until I nearly collapsed with exhaustion, revelling in the finest, mostly-religious art ever wrought. I spent half an hour staring at the little bas-relief Tondo Pitti by Michelangelo in the Bargello museum. I've never seen a more beautiful object created by any human being. Google it if you don't believe me. I dare the most fervent atheist on earth to tell me that it offends them. All this is my heritage as much as it's the heritage of the most fervent believer.

Diappointingly, in many Italian churches the statuary and other works of art are all too frequently of abysmal quality. I never want to see another painted saintly bearded type glowering over me with hand outstretched. And there appears to be the depiction of a skull, often with crossbones for good measure, somewhere in every church. Several times I've been unexpectedly confronted by the horror of a stash of saintly bones protruding from the top of an urn. Other churches contain some of the greatest art ever produced. My two favourites so far are the rear wall mosaic in the little cathedral on Torcello, one of the islands in the Venice lagoon, and the exterior especially of the Santa Croce basilica in Lecce.

Religious symbolism is not the same thing as those confounded confederate statues. The former is the visible manifestation of what billions of people see as being what is good in their lives and what will make humanity better. They may be largely wrong but those beliefs are generally held without malice. The latter is the attempt by racist bigots and white supremacists to perpetuate what should have been a dead and buried lost cause. The statues are demeaning to black people and they bear an implicit threat to them: "Don't think for one minute that this is all over..." The history happened in the Civil War and those statues are not part of it. They are partial, partisan, subjective and tendentious. History, well told, is none of those things. The statues themselves are the attempt to rewrite history, and that rewriting is not done by historians.

It's quite easy to spot the bigotry in these discussions. The best indicator of its presence is the complaining about the removal of the statues being a violation of free speech.