Your response was apt, in my opinion.

(One thing though – in the sense that a fairly high proportion of fertilized eggs don’t result in live birth – quite a lot never even implant, and in most of those cases the woman doesn’t even realize she was “pregnant” – maybe in that sense the womb is pretty “dangerous”. Why would god make so many pregnancies fail?)

I certainly do not want to argue your circular logic, but I will say this… With over 45 million abortions in the U.S. since 1973, the simple fact is that number far and away out strips any deaths that have occured in Iraq, Iran and Hiroshima (as you listed). This is not to debate whether abortion is right or wrong, as that is for you to decide, but just to put forth the facts.

Yes, my family are mostly Baptists, but my parents were more Pentecostal, so very fundamentalist and kind of wacky. I had a lot of problems with that type of thinking once I moved beyond believing what my parents told me. I attended a more moderate church as an adult for a few years, which I liked better, but really, I just kept digging, trying to discover the truth. If I had felt that moderate or liberal Christianity had had a solid foundation, I would have been content to stop there, but I don’t think they were any more solid than fundamentalism. So, I finally realized that the world makes much more sense without a god in the picture, imho.

I guess it would seem that because I ended up at the opposite end of the spectrum from where I started, that I would be a very black/white person, but that’s not really true. I think there are scientific ways to establish facts, and to better understand the way things work and what things are likely true/untrue, but there’s always a sliding scale, which will go one way or the other as we learn more about a subject. Also, when dealing with others, I think there are almost always multiple shades of gray.

In other words, you are someone who understands and sympathizes with fundamentalism perfectly, and perhaps you are a fundamentalist yourself in many ways, living your entire life in black-or-white, either/or.

It’s interesting to me the platforms that the Baptists choose to hang their hats on and I’m so glad that I realized growing up in that religion that it was not the place for me. I have to laugh at some of the propaganda emails I get from my family on similar subjects and try to shake my head and keep my mouth shut for the sake of peace in the family. lol

It’s not that Islam is better or worse than Christianity or any other belief system… but that every person who follows a religion is not necessarily a barbarian. It might simply be a choice of words that has sparked this discussion: I know that you called the religion barbaric, not the people; fine. However, if you call a whole religion barbaric, I think it’s important to also differentiate between the people who are and are not barbarians for being a part of an ideology. Even though it may well be barbaric in a number of ways, as illogical as that may seem to you now as you’re in the angry shedding phase. Every believer is *not* a fundamentalist.

Like I tried to say above, get angry about the fundamentalism, and like Jalf says, get angry about the socio/political/economic conditions that breed fundamentalism, THAT’s the real enemy.