Religocity is simply bad epistemology

"Religion, whether it is good or bad epistemology, is more than epistemology. It is a moral, cultural, and psychological system that has many uses in society..." There are many problems with your 'case' here. Most of them concern the flagrant inaccuracies in your comparative analysis of religion versus 'atheists'. But, instead of getting bogged down into a lengthy and irrelevant argument, I think I can circumvent that whole discussion with an intuitive distinction: there is a difference between a belief system and the implications of that belief system. An example will illustrate: Let's say I believe: 1. I am tired. 2. I need to wake up. Now, a potential implication of that belief system is that I might go and drink coffee, but this implication is not directly contained in the belief system. Analogously, religious charity, nation building etc. are implications of religious belief but are not religious beliefs in themselves (and that these actually result from religion is highly dubious as is). Since my critique is of the religion, not the implications of the religion, the critique is fine. The only other important claim is the paragraph beginning: "I'll give Christianity as an example of a religion with good evidence for many of its aspects..." Here I cannot reasonably ignore obvious fallacies in evidential defense of Christianity. The first is the claim that philosophers have logically proven the existence of God. Obviously, I'm going to need to see these arguments before I can refute them, but my intuition is that you are conflating the difference between an a priori argument and an a priori proof. However, regardless here's an argument I'll formalize right now which may logically disprove the existence of God: 1. a being is omnipotent iff (if and only if) he can do any action. 2. a being can either a)create a stone so big that he cannot lift it or b)lift any stone he creates. 3. a) and b) are mutually exclusive so no being can do both 4. there is an action no being can perform 5. there is no omnipotent being The next claim concerns the evidence for Jesus. Again, I will reason by analogy: Sathya Sai Baba is a contemporary South Indian guru and religious leader (you can read about him here: http://tiny.cc...) who is said to heal the sick, manifest food and holy ash, levitate, vanish and control the weather among other things. This man is not the David Koresh of Hinduism, his miracles are attested to by his 6 million followers including thousands of western-educated intellectuals. Claims about his mirracles are so unconvincing that they don't warrant an hour on the Discovery Channel, but if you take the same claims, and place them in the pre-scientific, ubiquitously superstitious context of the first century AD written in a book decades after they are supposed to have occurred, it suddenly becomes a legitimate project to build one's life around them. In any other context, knowing that a person existed, and that their body was not present in their burial spot would not warrant the conclusion that the person magically ascended into the sky and so, it should not warrant the conclusion here. Additionally, it is highly dubious that Jesus did in fact exist. There are no reliable extra-biblical accounts of his life (Pliny the younger allegedly mentions him, but this is an obvious forgery) and the accounts we have are highly suggestive of a mystery cult like the one surrounding Mithras where the existence of the central figure is not required. Finally, do enlighten me on how "The claims of Jesus being God's son also have evidence".