It is the lazy and non-thinking way to either use religion for an excuse or as a scapegoat. Both sides are playing the same game.

I would agree that siding with any religion one has been indoctrinated into is the lazy approach to finding anything resembling the truth. It takes a lot more energy to sift through the fantastical bullshit that passes for faith based ideology embraced by about 95% of the worlds population and deduce it's exactly that, fantastical bullshit.

As for using it as a scapegoat, well really, how hard is that when nearly every war ever fought has roots in religion? Even if one claims that statement itself is an untruth (though facts do prove otherwise), how hard is it for anyone to see how much ill will and derision amongst mankind differing religious factions add into the mix?

Lastly, no, I'm not playin the same game as faith based folks do. They only disagree with differing religions, while I disagree with ALL of 'em as ludicrous fantasies embraced by people with nothing more to base their belief on but faith. I'll take fact over faith every time.

While I can't provide factual evidence there is no god, that's really not required as I'm not trying to claim there IS one, much less one that can NOT be proven to even exist that I will still blindly accept the existence of simply ON faith alone, that's the believers job, not mine

Think about this, the world is not the same as it was even 50 years ago, much less so than it was 200, 800, 2000 or 3000 years ago. The ideas developed then are no longer valid. The same holds true for philosophy, sociology and politics. It is a very different world. We either learn and grow with it or get swallowed up in it. The same old ideas aren't working. The dead horse has been beaten into a frothing, gelatinous mass.

While the world and those in it are constantly changing, philosophy from many hundreds of years ago is as valid today as it's ever been, while I'll agree to sociology and politics as more evolutionary in scope as society itself changes.

While many religions have been bent to more neatly meet the changing mores and lifestyles of their believers, most do so as a way of drawing more folks in than as a way of evolving in the core beliefs they hold true and even then, most of any such changes are embraced by fringe factions of religions while most hardcore believers tend to hold to more rigid ideas initially set forth by their chosen faith.

If there's any dead horses to be considered here I'd say religion IS that horse, 'cept that sadly it AIN'T dead

To JG, it would seem that perhaps you haven't seen The Lathe of Heaven (and if not I'd recommend the original version over the newer one). In the film if the main character dreamed of something, when he awoke, what he dreamed was how the world was and it was if it had always been that way, so no one knew any different.

In that sense, my statement of the "abolition of religion" would not be depriving anyone of their faith, but simply mean that in everyones minds, religion had never existed at all, which I would see as the best possible scenario