"... anyone that can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities."
There is little in the realm of human experience more absurd than the belief that the Earth is only 6,000 years old. Or that penguins waddled thousands of miles to board Noah's floating zoo, while ignoring completely the fact that many hundreds of civilizations thrived at the same time this supposed flood was taking place. Or that the Earth is flat, though that little tidbit of idiocy doesn't have any obvious religious foundation.
It was unthinking, unwavering "faith" that led Jim Jones' followers to commit mass suicide, and led to the tragic standoff between David Koresh and his followers, and the FBI. Fanatical belief in imaginary deities and/or false prophets has fueled more acts of unimaginable depravity than anything else in all of human history. The Crusades were a prime example of monstrous religious hubris, the consequences of which echo throughout the Mideast to this very day.
Without exception, the vilest perpetrators of unspeakable evil polluting the halls of Congress always wrap themselves in the blood-soaked cloak of extreme religiosity, and the stochastic terrorism that results from the verbal vomit spewed by those people proves, yet again, that religion is the greatest fomenter of hatred and intolerance in the history of humanity.
"God spoke to me", should be the klaxon-horn warning that a fanatic is about to justify its evil because Jesus.
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