You are feeding my point exactly.....
So much good charitable work is done by churches. So many schools and libraries founded.
Hmmm.....Schools and libraries......So lets fund a school......great! Great way to entice someone into your belief system, and have some influence on the impressionable minds of young people......and I'll go off on schools here in a moment......but first....
Libraries? Think about this for a moment......So now we have places that store hard copies of our collective information affiliated with an organization that goes massively out of its way to force its dis-information on even more of the masses......When certain books are denied entry to a library because a "church group" or someone speaks up because it says something bad about god, the church, etc.....
Just more ways to control what we are allowed to think, read, say, believe.......etc.
Same thing goes for schools......you are taught what THEY want you to know. Period. The history we are taught, the "social studies", even the sciences......you are taught one version of reality all thru your life so you come out indoctrinated into THEIR beliefs and THEIR reality......all they want is for you to come out a good little consumer who doesn't question things in an unconventional manor....
God forbid they let someone who has a mind of their own and knows how to use it, like me, escape the system....and believe me, they tried their damnedest to stifle me.
And the comfy middle-class types who fall into that latter group are WAY less likely to volunteer and donate to charities--that's a fact.
Exactly....why do it if you have all the brainwashed sheeple already doing it "in the name of God"? Most of that said middle-class is brainwashed into thinking and believing this way.
For every good any church has ever done, you are bound to find at least 3 evils......so the ratio of good to evil with organized religion is 1:3.....
Religion's only purpose (in my eyes) is to create yet another way to divide the human consciousness and pit us against ourselves (keeping us busy fighting and killing each other) so they can exert their will and control over the rest of the population. England/Ireland? Over religion........Crusades?......How about English Colonial expansion into Africa?

.....no more Shamen (our collective intelligence), convert to Christianity (what we TELL you is fact)!
To bring it to even more recent times......Huckabee and Romney......fighting over their religion, in a PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE WHERE IT HAS ABSOLUTELY NO BELONGING.
Just another way to divide and control......