Fareed Zakaria addressed yesterday the growing loss of religion in the US. While he credits science (better understanding of the world) and reason for people leaving religion, he also claims that the main factor is that religion has become something associated with Republicans and thus people who don't want to be associated with Republicans are ditching religion. Which to me sounds nonsensical because if people believed that they had strong evidence for the existence of God, they would do anything to please him. Another nonsense is that he claims how people have an inborn desire to believe in God ("a hole in the body that needs to be filled with god"), and thus, it is dangerous to fill this hole with just anything.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
