People may think I may be pugnacious from reading this, but bearing in mind I have lived successfully among very religious people in some very religious cultures - I'm quite accepting of others and they have accepted me. I respect other people and I do not argue, if asked I respectfully state my ideas about the major monotheistic religions, around which this debate seems to have focused.
Within every population, be it seeds, flowers, loaves of bread, animals, people etc, there is a range of distributions. Look at your workplace or your local town for example, there is a wide variety of psychologies. There is nothing debatable about that, it is mathematics. The same is true for religion, within religion there will be range of personalities, psychologies. There are people who claim to be (for example) Christian, who have never really considered it all, they don't really practice, they don't question it, they don't pay much attention to it either...but if they considered it they would realise that they are not religious. Then on the other end of the spectrum you have the zealots, those who are fanatical. And then you have all of those who fall in between.
The dangerous thing about the worlds monotheistic religions is that as long as they exist there will be groups of people who are extreme, those who believe violence is justifiable to support their ideology. Of course this is true for many ideologies, most notably politics ones, and extreme people will always exist. But what separates religion from politics and other ideologies is that it gives you 'the God given right' to perform outrages acts, and there are countless examples of this. I am not saying religion permits atrocious acts (that is another argument all together - as some of texts support morals that are quite frankly disgusting), I am just saying that in the minds of some people god permits them to do hideous things in order to support their beliefs, and they believe that they will be rewarded at the end of it. That is very dangerous and very scary.
Despite the fact that religion does offer support to many, as long as people read and believe religious texts that were written thousands of years ago as an attempt to understand the word and as a way of controlling society, we will struggle with unnecessary violent conflicts, and we will have those individuals who seek to integrate religion into politics which will result in oppression. Just look Christian right in the U.S.A and how George Bush continuously referred to god being on his side, and to the side of all those who voted for him, as he funded millions of dollars to bomb the Middle East so that they can take control of its oil fields.
Beetzart, I wish I could agree with you that region will decrease and science will grow, but religion has all the signs of a viral meme (unit of cultural inheritance), it is inherited through families, and is also inherited by those susceptible, it alters the thinking of the individuals who have it and it alters their behavior. People may think this sounds odd and even pigheaded, but it isn't as odd as it may sound. It is established and it may never decrease. There is no evidence for the truth of these kinds of monotheistic teachings, but there is an overwhelming quantity of evidence supporting the fact that they are primitive texts constructed by medieval, institutionalised scholars who sought to explain the world and who sought to provide a framework to create moral order within society (conform you will go to heaven, fail to conform and you face eternal hell). Yet, people in modern 21st century society still believe them.
