In article <4756dd54@news.povray.org>, nos### [at] nospamcom says...
> My mom also has a fairly strong faith; the Lutheran church (which I was
 
> brought up in) convinced me that organized religion was largely bunk 
> because I saw the infighting between the pastoral staff (I worked the 
> sound booth, and a lot of time when they were around those of us doing 
> the sound, they were very unguarded in their comments).  When you see 
> clergy acting like "normal people", they lose their mysticism (if it can
 
> be called that).  I also saw a lot more of the financial side than I 
> probably should have - and here in Utah, it's hard to ignore the large 
> section of local (and larger) businesses that are not merely LDS-owned,
 
> but owned by the LDS church.  TIME magazine did a story a few years back
 
> on the church's financial holdings, and the number and types of 
> businesses they own is truly staggering.
> 
> ...
> 
> Yet at the same time, I cannot ignore the things the church has done to
 
> help her through some pretty difficult issues.  So for her, her faith 
> works and has made her happier.  Who am I to argue with the result?
> 
Well, this is one common argument. That the good outweighs the bad of 
it. But, you just described in pretty clear terms above that it *isn't* 
doing them all that much good at all, even if they spend a lot of times 
telling themselves it is, and feeling all warm and fuzzy about how 
everyone agrees with them on the matter. But no, arguing with someone 
too far gone isn't productive at all. One is forced to simply hope that 
something happens to jar them into questioning matters, and hope that it 
is, how ever much you would prefer otherwise, painful enough that they 
truly question why it happened. Some people never escape, such as the 
people in one church recently that where betrayed completely by their 
priest, and didn't just leave, they closed the church. Some of them 
might take a real hard look at their beliefs. The rest will just dive 
head first into some nearby church with the same sort of leader, the 
same double standards, the same comfortable lies, and 10-20 years down 
the road it will happen all over again.

The most serious problem isn't trying to convince a lot of fools to open 
their eyes to the truth, the problem is convincing them that that their 
gullibility ***is*** being used to promote the ideas and beliefs of 
people that think there is no difference between Christians that are not 
from the *right* church and atheists, and whose three biggest arguments 
are: 1. The persecution of their *minority* of true believers by a vast 
cabal of evil, satan worshipping, atheists (heh, its religion, nothing 
about it needs to make any sense, and the entire argument makes as much 
sense as trying to use a solar powered calculator, to determine the 
positions of stars, while spelunking). 2. That science is part of this 
vast conspiracy (except when they can find some vague, meaningless, 
statement they can claim showed that some scientist was a believer) and 
3. Everything that isn't Biblical is atheist (which leads to the 
inevitable insane attempts to prove that everything from Microwave ovens 
to antibiotics where **somehow** hidden in Bible passages).

The danger, and is *always* the case isn't that a huge number of 
gullible, ignorant, fools will rise up and replace sane and rational 
people with nuts, who will drag us into the dark ages. The danger is 
that the huge number of gullible, ignorant, fools won't realize what a 
tiny number of nuts are really doing, until its too late for the sane 
and rational people to stop them. Texas just fired its *only* pro-
science representative from their board responsible for determining what 
science standards should be, and they previously tried to get their pro-
creation text books accepted as the national standard for all schools. 
The only good thing about it being that they **apparently** either don't 
understand, or inexplicably missed, that tiny, barely noticeable trial, 
where *precisely* the same BS they are trying to pull was thrown out as 
unconstitutional. But, now that Texas is at it again, some morons in 
Florida are grunting and snorting too, in hopes that if Texas falls, 
they can get what they want in Florida too.

And, when 48% of the country thinks that evolution "is" invalid and 
creationism makes more sense, trying to point out to the gullible masses 
that the DI doesn't intend to stop with that, but to undermine 
***everything***, just goes right over their heads.

That is the real problem. Not whether or not your mother goes to some 
church that sounds about the same as damn near every LDS or other church 
I have personally had experience with, or heard other atheists (and to 
some extent, almost every Christian I know) describe as one they have 
come from, currently attend and/or know about from other people.

-- 
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    }
    call functional_code();
  }
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}

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