[nnq]

Try travelling around the world a bit and see for yourself that there's more than to it than the "american brand" of Christianity. European Catholics are more "lightweight" when it comes to their belief and when science and reason contradicts religion they'll take the science/reason way in 9 out of 10 cases. Orthodox Christians in Eastern Europe and Russia have a similar mindset and and they also take things with a grain of humor (even more than a grain sometimes) and are ok even with making fun of their own beliefs :)

If you generalize a bit, you see that things went down hill since the protestants tried to reform Christianity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_Reformation , also, what I call "american brand C." is all a radicalized descendent of protestant reformation), had some mixed good and bad philosophical ideas mixed in with "faith", but mainly managed to take themselves waaaaaaay too seriously!

Mind it, I'm an atheist myself, but C. in not that harmful if not taken too far and it's sometimes good for humor ...now if only people could manage to also take Islam this lightly and look more at its funny sides :)

[zacinbusiness]

I'll agree here. The American brand that has spawned the tea party and is super racist is a crazy death cult. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that somewhere there are good Christians. But I just don't see it in my experience with thousands of then in the USA.