Shii, your godlove is much appreciated and all but a bit of a derail.

The god or not issue has been debated in other threads. Plenty of scientists like to use god as the black box until they get finer tools, and then put god as the new black box at the new edge of measurability.

Again, the heart of this discussion is organized religion in general. Their methods of operation, depending on the particular church, range from simple high pressure coersion to flat out terrorism (both foreign and domestic). Hell, Rajneespuram managed to convince PhDs and other intellectuals to become gun-toting martyrdom-ready guardsmen as Rajneesh reaped in millions through donations and hostile takeover of the local town.

Smaller cults, the kinds that make the news, get mocked because they tend to be small and fleeting. However, I’d posit that a hundred Jonestowns would be FAR better for society than the tiniest fragment of catholicism, simply because of the volumes of falsified histories and ancestral ties people have to the church, because it’s just one more reason for idiots to turn off their brains and blindly follow the whims of the reigning regressive guy in the funny hat.