I realized that I forgot to respond to your question:
"...what are your problems as an Atheist with Organized Religion
Now that is one statement that could lead to hours of speaking on my part. Or paragraphs, as this is more text than dialogue. Literally entire books have been written by people who I hold in the highest regard doing nothing but addressing that selfsame question, so forgive me if I approach this with a bit of trepidation, I doubt highly that I'll be able to give you a simple and concise answer.
My problems with organized religion, specifically the cases where large gatherings of people will come together to listen to one person speaking with authority, specifically god given authority, and take the words of this person as an absolute truth is...well frightening. Now I will concede that in the vast majority of instances of this occurring (for examples, go to any church in America) its benign. The preacher will speak out to his congregation to be good, the congregation will think "yes I should be good" and everyone goes home to a nice lunch. The problem arises when you grant someone authority over your personal mores with no good reason.
It is here that you will think I'm picking on the fanatics. The extreme right wingers who stand on street corners and hold up the "Thank God for 9/11" signs, but they are exactly the ones I'm trying to pick on. They are the ones who have given up the rational sides of their thought processes in order to believe what someone who claimed authority on no more basis than "I'm claiming this authority," and will let these self proclaimed teachers feed them whatever bull they want.
Organized religion, even in its friendly social gathering type of organization is setting up a groundwork that can be exploited by outsiders for malevolent purposes. If you tell someone from the time they are an infant that religious authorities draw their authority from God, and tell them that you have to believe the authority you have created an exploitable network of thought processes that can be undermined at the first opportunity, and in many cases will be.
Ok, new point: Organized religion as an ingroup/outgroup dynamic labeling setup. Humans tend to cluster into "us vs them" dichotomy's along any lines we can jump to. Xenophobia is in our genes, and there are some very good evoultionary models explaining why. This doesn't make them right, it just shows that xenophobia is not only likely to evolve, it's going to remain stable and will be very difficult for a different system to arise once it takes hold. I won't go into the whole argument here, but you can find the papers on it with a simple google or wikipeda search. Ok, sorry had a slight digression there but it was ncessary for what I'm going to bring up now.
Religion is an incredibly easy system for forming outgroups where none exist. Case in point, Northern Ireland. Iraq, Iran, and any arabic nation where the sunni vs shi'a insanity takes place. These are people that are indistinguishable, save a SLIGHT disagreement on what some jerk said 600 years ago. And for that jerks words they kill one another. Now the Irish aren't killing someone with the thought "oh look, this guy believes in trans-substantion of the communion, oooh I hate that!" Of course not! They are killing a catholic because a catholic killed their protestant friend who was killed because some catholic was taking revenge for a protestant that had killed one of his catholic friends. Its outgroup labeling, pure and simple and it needs to stop. Now I don't for a minute think that if we take away religious labels that suddenly world peace will fly into existance...of course not, people will find some other reason to label the outgroup and we will turn our aim to that and fight it as strongly as we do religion, racisim or nationalism, but I will not, nor will many others, sit by and accept it as a fact of life.
Well thats 2 proplems with Organized religion, I'll stop before I drift into my problems with religion as a whole.
All yours bro.
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