Is Islam the religion of peace.....pffft....NO

[Thumpalumpacus]

Like it or not, our western culture IS influenced by christianity. I'm certain you had atleast one ancestor who was christian.

No one said our Western culture weas not influenced by Christianity. My point was that Christian values and dictates had much less to do with our system of justice than the writings of guys like Locke and Montesquieu.

Ironically the Christian world was the first to fight for human rights.

And in a neat double irony, Christians have been fighting a rearguard action for the last fifty years in denying human rights for woman and gays, both here in the West, and in places like Africa.

Don't take offense but I think you guys are too rigid in your view of religion. Yes it has been used to justify wrongs but it isn't all bad.
In my opinion viewing it as purely evil isn't a good way to look at things in the world. The church is responsible for the operation of various orphanages, schools, hospitals, charities and the largest private healthcare financing in the world. And it's been doing the same since the beginning, even during the plague.

The evils that flow from blind faith far outweigh the good deeds done by the faithful. Blind faith and an appeal to a superstitious entity have been behind racism, sexism, homophobia, and wars innumerable, not to mention the justification of immoral behavior.

Of course there are good and bad aspects to everything, but blind faith and organized religion both seem to have their good outweighed by their evils.

So no . . . This doesn't cancel out the bad, but please don't have such a narrow view of anything.

My views are based on my 48 years observing the way religions work. It's not "narrow."

I feel people will be happier if they let go of what some institutions did in the past and accept that everything has good and bad traits.

The problem with this view is that you Christians won't stop trying to advance your religious cause. Here, look at yourself, you're a great example: you come to an atheist forum and start telling people you don't know how to behave. Do you see me going to Christian forums and telling them their god is evil? No, because if they want to believe that he's good and worthy of worship, they can have at it.

On a wider, sociocultural scale Christians weren't happy with, say, the belief that marriage can only be heterosexual; instead, Christians all across the nation have fought a rearguard action against gay marriage, seeking to deny the Constitutional right to equal protection under the law to gays simply because your little book says they're abominations.

Christians keep on trying to spend my tax dollars on your religions without regard to the fact that I don't agree that government has any business doing things like supprting religious charities.

I'm not willing to let any bygones be bygones while Christians keep trying to foist their religion upon society at large, and trying to shove their beliefs down my throat -- even as they cry "persecution!" at the drop of a hat.

I don't think that if the Europeans of the 18th century were atheists slavery wouldn't have happened. In my opinion their excuse for slavery would've been survival of the fittest.

Setting aside your anachronism for a moment, we'll never know, because atheists were forced to remain silent at risk of jailtme, or worse.

So my point is . . . Just chill the hell out and be cool

Quit lecturing people you don't even know.