Religion isn't usually the thing that kills people, people kill people. (Classic arguement, but it's true.)

I bring up this question because I've seen many religious arguments on Vgchartz that are a waste of time. I think it's completely pointless to argue with somebody about religion. It always creates disagreements and anger as well as doubt and never comes to a solution. Religion is based off faith, not scientific facts. 

For example: I'm a Christian. So while I believe the stories in the Bible as fact, I cannot prove they happened. There is no science behind that, only faith. So why try to disprove me? I don't have any hard evidence to back up my beliefs. You're only wasting your time with your never-ending struggle to change what I belief. 

Here's another example. Take somebody who is a Muslim. They believe in the stories found in the Qur'an. Why would I waste my time arguing with them about my Christian beliefs? My thought process to that is, while I think what they believe is idiotic and untrue, IT'S WHAT THEY BELIEVE. They should have the same thought process about me. They think what I believe is idiotic. Preaching to them my beliefs will only anger them and create an argument, therefore making them even less likely to hear what it is I have to say. 

As for atheists, you base your arguments on reasoning and logic, as well as thousands of years of scientific experiments and facts. You come at those who believe in a higher power, such as myself, as if you are more intellectual than us. You say you have science to base your arguments on and all we have are books that are thousands of years old and trust in the higher power whom we follow. With that said, you are completely right. We don't have anything to base our beliefs on. Scientists are very smart people and a lot of what they say is true. However, why waste your time? If you truly believe in something you won't be swayed to another side by numbers and science thrown in your face. I don't care if you're an atheist. I really don't. I have many friends that are atheists and they're awesome people to hang around with. With that said trying to disprove either side will create problems every time. It's pointless.

I wrote this very quickly so it probably wasn't worded very well, but I just wanted to get my point across and try to see what other people have on this. But most importantly, why are we even having religious talk on a video game website? 

So why not start a crusade against 'crazy religious people', people that actually believe or do the stuff you describe. I don't think any of the people posting in this thread match your descriptions, so you're barking up the wrong tree. Creating a straw man that exemplifies the worst possible misuses of religion, then projecting that straw man onto nonviolent, tolerant, non-activist religious people is counter productive and only makes you look intellectually lazy and intolerant. As defined by their results, there are good religious beliefs, neutral beliefs, and bad religious beliefs, as well as good governments, neutral, and bad governments, as well as mixes of good and bad in both cases. Either way, it would be incorrect to lump all the good and bad together and attack the entire premise based only on the bad (especially in cases where the bad is a clear perversion of the intention of a particular teaching). Anarchists are to governments what activist atheists are to religion, they simply go way overboard based on only the potential negative aspects of what they rail against.

On a side note, atheistic darwinism without any moral balance could be taken to the extreme as well. One could argue based purely on natural selection that weaker humans who are a detriment to the fitness of the species should be killed, left to die, or sterilized. Without any higher moral authority, what's to stop that train of thought from happening? The human race has proven over and over that it can pervert any worldview to perpetrate evil, so without any belief or moral compass, this is a possible natural course for humanity... It's arguably for the 'greater good' of the species as a whole based solely on naturalistic arguments. Where do our innate rights come from if not from a higher power? There are many, many arguments that could be made based purely on darwinism, natural selection, and fitness of the species that most everybody here would consider evil... where does that sense of what is wrong originally come from?

These atrocities was a clear perversion of the actual message, so much so that the 'church' (which by this time was actually a theistic government, something Jesus never wanted) ended up putting the words of Jesus into latin so the common people could not understand them, this was so they could use religion as a tool to build their own power and agenda. They had to hide the actual words of Jesus in order to perpetrate their evil agenda. I fault the corruption of power and evil people for the atrocities you talk about, I cannot fault the core message which is tolerance, love, humility, self-control, non-violence, and equality - a person or group that actually holds to those standards could not commit such atrocities.

Hypothetically speaking, if I told you that you should love others, and you took it as a call to kill anybody that doesn't exhibit love as you choose define it, that would not reflect badly on me as you would be perverting my words. The same is true in this case. In all honesty, the deliberate misuse of Christianity by evil and intolerant people who only (selfishly) seek to grow their own power and agenda (or to 'force' people to act as they want) pisses me the hell off, so in that sense of 'religion', I would completely agree with you. The problem comes when you try to lump true followers of the message in with this blatent evil, as we live in the exact opposite manner to what you described.

What about the 30,000 witch burnings in Germany during the Protestant Inquisition there or the 100 people that had their lives ruined at Salem, Massachusetts or the 127 killed by devout Mormons on September 11, 1857 at Mountain Meadows?  All of these acts were committed by  people that thought they were following The Bible / Their Holy Books to the letter.

And the book is filled with enough atrocities of its own right from the Hebrews white washing of whatever they did to the people of Cannaan whom were probably no worse than the Native Americans or South Americans that Europreans thinking they had a Mandate from Heaven destroyed.

Or its calls for the wholesale slaughter of gays, children that disobey their parents, witches, and census takers in the Old Testament to Jesus own words that he came to bring a sword to the Book of Revelations which says that all those people following that ancient book of fiction to the letter get to go to Heaven and everybody else on earth goes to Hell in the New Testament?  That modly, oldy roll of tp is based on divisiveness.

All of the things you state are awful, and I'm clearly not advocating any of them. You're again citing the worst possible use of a particular tool, which does not prove the tool in itself is bad. A baseball bat can and is used for murder and torture in many cases, but that is not its intent. The tool is not the problem, the one improperly using it is. You keep listing bad things people did in the name of religion, things that are condemned by the vast majority of the modern religious/spiritual community as evil.

What about the holocaust, the Hun invasions & massacres, the atrocities and murder by the communist regimes of recent history, the atrocities commited by the secular government of Saddam, the wars in Africa with Africans selling their own brothers into the slave trade during the 1800's, the guerilla warfare and child soldiers of today, the sex-slave trade that is ongoing across the world now, the murderous drug cartels in south america, gang culture in the inner city, many of the various genocides that have taken place in eastern Europe, or the countless other atrocities commited by humans all on their own? Again, the issue is not specifically religion, but the natural state of the human race. We as a species can corrupt anything we put our minds to given half the chance. I see a correct application of the words of Jesus as an antidote to the natural state of humanity.

If you look specifically at the residents of caanan and their practices related to baal worship, they did some pretty awful things for over 500 years (including sacrificing/torturing their living firstborn babies in fire during their religious services), so no comparison to native americans. I'm not going to get into this particular debate, because frankly it's just flamebait and I'm not going there.

When he says 'I came to bring a sword' in the book of Matthew, this can also be translated as 'division' (the word Sword is only used in some translations), referring to the conflict within a family or culture that ensues when people choose to follow his teachings, a 'division' which he went on to describe right after he said this (similar to the debate going on here).

When the new testament talks about people being cast out of God's presence on judgement day (what this means is up for debate), it was actually referring the religious ones who used religion selfishly.

On the Holocaust:  There's a great deal of evidence that Hitler was as much or more of a believing Christian than he was anything else.  And the Holocaust has a great deal of antcedents in how the Christians treated the Jews ( and others) during the Inquisitions and Witch Hunts of earlier centuries, so it can be seen in many ways as just a continuation of those practices.  To paraphrase Christopher Hitchins, the Catholic biaes towards Jews in that region of the world for centuries probably had a significant impact on Hitler's ideology.

On the other content in that paragraph:  Just because there are other vile things in the world it doesn't mean you should excuse another vile thing for being vile.

On the words of Jesus:  Maybe there's a bit of truth to that, but how many Christians really only rely on the Words of Jesus as their only arbiter about the world?  Certainly the vast majority of American Christians that want to deny gays the right to marry, or that don't want Evolution taught in schools because "It's ag'n God's Word", or that want to control what women do with their own bodies, or that really believe the end of the world is going to unfold  as their tv preachers tell them it  will on Sunday Mornings with them invariably as the only good people in the world (especially if they pay their tithes) and everyone else being a vile sinner that deserves the gravest punishment do that?

And as I pointed out before most Christians don't live by or even know about Jesus' words in "The Gospel of Thomas" which many modern scholars continue to believe is as close or closer to what Jesus actually said than any of the Biblical Gospels.

On Cannaan:  I don't really know how bringing up a significant historical matter could be considered flamebait.  Even if the Cannanites were practicing human sacrifice, much as that doesn't discharge the Spanish Conquistadores from the atrocities they committed upon the Meso-American Indians for doing the same thing, that wouldn't justify the Hebrews wholesale slaughter of them ( except for the attractive virgin girls).

Two wrongs don't make a Right.  And it's not as if the Hebrews could be judged to be innocent of charges of human sacrifices themselves with King David's admonition to dash the little ones upon the stones in "Psalms",  Moses' admonition to kill all the male children ( and everyone else except for the aforementioned young ladies) in "Numbers", Abraham's willingness to kill one of his children and to turn another one of his infants out into the desert to fend for itself in Genesis, and Yahweh's murder of his own reputed offspring in The New Testament...and not to mention his wholesale slaughter of everyone on earth including innocent animals in Genesis and upcoming murders in Revelations.

On Jesus bringing a sword:  If it means division, then I was corrrect in saying the Bible is 'divisive'.

You say in your posts that you don't approve of all these bad actions your fellow Christians have committed during their history and that's a good thing.  However, when your fellow Christians continue to deny others the trivialist of rights like gays the simple right to get married due to some passages that you don't seem to approve of in your own Holy Text, and to continue to committ other vile acts in the name of their God then they need to be debated with.

I'm only going to respond to part of this because I don't gots the time to go through everything...

First, though Hitler may have tried to use a false, self-invented perversion of Christianity to justify some of his craziness in his early political career, in the end he removed Christian symbolism and replaced them with his own image once he had complete power. He was in no sense of the word 'Christian' and was known to attempt to use any tool at his disposal to further his power as it was expedient at the time. A psychopath like this would use any tools at his disposal in an attempt to gain power, without religion in the picture, other tools would have filled the void.

I think you're specifically referring to a vocal fundamentalist sect of Christianity, so just a part of it, there are many Christian or Religious people out there who don't want to deny anybody rights, they're just generally more quiet (since they're not motivated to call everybody sinners), so you don't hear from us as much. As a parallel, I don't assume all Democrats are nut-jobs just because of some wackos at the occupy protests. I guess what I'm really getting at is that we completely agree on the atrocities and misuses of religion, and would both actively speak out against those. I simply disagree with lumping all faith/belief into the same bucket as cold, hard, legalistic religion or violent extremism. In all honesty, I don't particularly like to call myself religious because of the cold, lifeless rule-following that is associated with the term. I believe in a life changed from the inside out, so that I'm not following some set of rules, but my entire being is redeemed so that my actions are naturally positive as a reflection of my changed attitudes. I want to be a better person for my sake, for the sake of those around me, and to represent my God in the best way possible, not just because some dusty book of lifeless rules tells me to. It's something very personal and empowering that I have a hard time accurately describing.