It's a Fair Cop, Guv'ner.
You are correct, Strelnikov-san. I most likely have been in error regarding the choice of word. For all my previous posts that may make me come across as a militant agnostic ("I don't know the answers and neither do you!"), I really have no quarrel with the average person of faith who uses their religion as the moral guidepost it was menat to be. These are not the people I intended to poke fun at. My view of Christainity is similar to Gandhi's thoughts when asked his opinion of Western Civilization: "I think it would be a wonderful thing if someone actally tried it."
My beef is with those individuals who use religion as the backboard with which they slam dunk themselves into everybody else's business. The modern Pharisees who think that their endorsement of a certain belief system entitles them to dictate how others run their lives. The people who do not believe in their particular God nearly as much as they believe that you must believe in their particular God as well, or else. The people who crave to bolster their faith by having strength of numbers on their side, as if popularity was the sole criteria for truth. (Yes, 20 million Elvis fans can be wrong.) And most (if not all) of the offenders that I was seeking to mock suscribe to the viewpoint that the Christian Bible is absolute literal fact with no room for allegorical or poetic interpretation. (Except, of course, for the Book of Revelations, which can be routinely twisted and contorted to fit current events in order to enforce the notion that the End is nanoseconds away. If the Bible says that God created all life on Earth during a one-week period 6000+/- years ago, then the Fossil Record is Satan's Trickery. However, we shouldn't be on the lookout for a real physical Great Beast with seven heads because that's only symbolism.) It's that brand of inflexibility and stubborn refusal to accept the existence of alternative views even as abstract concepts that usually leads to trouble. It's the sort of mindset that was ready to burn Galileo at the stake because he told the Church what he had seen with his own eyes through his telescope. "I know I'm right, your facts are irrelevant."
I was however, incorrect to lump them together with the likes of Strel's friends & neighbors. To use a logician's anaology, All of John F. Kennedy is dead, but not everything dead is John F. Kennedy. I am at a bit of a loss to find an appropriate word to replace my inadequate original choice.