Religion was a mistake.

You make realy good points, and they seem to make sense so in order to help sign post I will take the arguement paragraph by paragraph. I am also going to do this refutation in two different ways, the first part being in true debate style, the second part going into a more philosophical debate (that seems to be more of what you are looking for) so here we go. Part 1:Because you agree with my definitions and analysis (you specifically stated that relgion does have misunderstandings) you do nothing but agree with my side of the debate. Going along with the facts that you haven't proved that religion doesn't cause misunderstandings, the voters can see nothing but a pro ballet. To strengthen my arguement, all i have to prove is that religion is misunderstood. With my three points, i have clearly showed this, and my opponets arguement was that he agreed with me. Part 2: (This is going to be longer and in more depth)(i think people should have religion, so this is all debate, fyi :) So as to your question, was it all a mistake; i think we can pretty much say yes it was; but there was no way to prevent it. According to the pope himself, as well as many philosophers themselves, humans want by nature to believe in something higher than themselves. All of the ancient societies had many gods and its only been in the last few centuries that secular humanism, and atheism has really come about. And for the arguement that without religion suicide rates go up? (I am not using totalitarian governments where the religion has been forced upon the citizens). Of the top 25 nations ranked on the 'Human Development Index' in which the United Nations bases all the nations on life expectancy, education, literacy, income, etc. All of the nations, except for Ireland and the United States, have a large population of atheists (such as Norway, Sweden, Canada, Netherlands, and Ausralia). The bottom fifty countries on the list also had the lowest atheist levels on earth. Going off of infant-mortality rate, irreligious countries had some of the lowest rates, while other religious countries had some of the highest rates. Going specifically to your suicide question, while the former soviets countries such as lithuania, belarus, latvia do have some of the highest suicide rates, this is actually contributed to the poverty, and economic hardships faced by these people. The Scandanavian countries where atheists are quite a large population (in sweden around 85% have identified themselves as atheist, or 7,638,000 people; in norway around 72%, or 3,294,000 people; and denmark at 80% of people, or 4,330,000 people) (CIA World Factbook), are actually not even close to being the top suicide rates. In fact these countries that do not worhship god have some of the lowest HIV/AIDS rate because they don't have people objecting to sex education. People also seem to be more accepted in these atheist countries, where gender equality is the highest in the world, according to national geographic they are also the most democratic, and homosexuality is not condemned. Finally, to your last arguement for morality, are not Buddhists some of the most moral people on earth? They don't have a god to look to, but rather towards self-actualization. And if we look towards morality being taught, did the gods really come down to earth and show us how to be nice, or was it rather part of human nature to help fellow humans. We are by nature social, and we can't stand to be apart from human companionship. People don't want to be near people who are rude, so we adapt by being nice and helping out other people. Morality can be taught by people, philosophers such as john locke, voltaire who were not religious were quite able to find ways for people to better behave and act in society.