Is religion necessary in humanity

First of all I would like to make it quite clear I am attacking my opponents arguments and not attacking my opponent. Also, I apologize if I've gone a little overboard while on he offensive Danielawesome--no harm meant. With that said: 1. The fundamental problem with my opponents argument is that it does not address the proposition head on. The proposition is: Is religion NECESSARY in my humanity. My opponent is arguing the negative so we would presumably hear some arguments about how groups of humanity have gotten by without religion or how humanity can function perfectly in its absence. We do not receive any argument on the point, actually. In fact my opponent's argument only mentions the word "necessary" twice. Once when it repeated the proposition and once when it spoke of the necessity of having a definition for Religion. In fact from this argument we've learned more about the necessity of having definitions within a debate then we've learned about the necessity, or lack thereof, of Religion to humanity. What we receive instead are arguments about how religion is somehow bad or harmful. An attribute entirely irrelevant to the necessity of a thing or group. It"s NECESSARY that we breathe in order to stay alive and yet every breath we take brings us closer to death therefore harming us. By the logic of my opponent's argument this breathing would thus be harmful and therefore somehow unnecessary. So we should all just stop breathing and kill the patient to instill the cure. Ridiculous. The ridiculous always follows in the trail of the irrelevant or fallacious. Similarly, it might also recommend that a scalpel is not necessary for surgery because it wounds the patient, or an antisceptic not necessary for treating wounds because it kills bacteria, etc., etc. All these point to the fact that this argument is, properly, a Red Herring fallacy. Subtly related, but in truth entirely irrelevant to the proposition at hand. The proposition does not call upon us to castigate this or that group--it calls upon us to do something very practical--to address the necessity of an aspect of culture to humanity. This would call for the negative example illustrating how humanity may exist without Religion, not how religion has made this or that action. 2. For the sake of argument, but not ceding the legitimacy of point #1, I"ll assume that my opponent"s argument was addressing a proposition relevant to his points. Let"s say something like "Religion is bad or harmful". The problem with all of the arguments on this point is that they show a lack of distinguishment or distinction. There are what, several billion people on the face of the planet who practice one religion or another? My opponent"s argument takes actions from fanatical muslims and far, far right Christians and assigns them to this entire class of Religious followers. In fact, it specifically cites as the problem Muslims whose "mind(s) justify actions like attacking civilian targets including woman and children." As well as Christians who "push their religions into schools." I would suggest that the majority of the billions of religious practitioners BY FAR do not routinely go about killing civilians or even take actions which "push" their religion on schools. These are distinct subcategories within a much, much larger whole. The fallacy committed here is that of a Hasty Generalization. Popular in politics, this is where an argument erroneously draws a conclusion about ALL members of a group from evidence that comes only from a small selected sample. This despite the reasonable likelihood that this minority trait is not reflective of the whole. Here, the argument takes the most violent, radical or difficult minorities (they are signifigant minorities even within their own religions) within the category of religious people and attributes their actions and motivations to the whole--several billion strong and of which something like 99+ percent do not engage in anything like these activities (in fact they practice just the opposite). At such a high percentage, statistically these attributes may just as "legitimately" be applied to humanity as the whole. Then we could argue that we are ALL both aggressively intolerant of science and enjoy killing people. Again, ridiculous and shows the lack of properly drawn distinctions within a class within my opponent's argument. 3. His argument states: "The main problem with religion particularly theistic religion is that they are authoritarian in nature and it is that authoritarian nature that makes it dangerous." And "The authority is not to be questioned." This is just a misreading of the process of religion. Counter examples would include that most Catholics do not follow many of the dictates of the Pope, Protestants make their own interpretations through reading the text of the Bible and questioning it, entire tracts have been written in Hebrew, I"m sure, questioning this or that action of God. Christ himself questioned God just before his death. With the exception of a few fundamentalist groups, Religion is a process which calls upon every faculty of the worshipper, including their ability to interpret and question their God in good faith. 4. My opponent's argument ends with the assertion that "religion promotes beliefs in unsubstantiated claims." I would suggest that my opponents arguments rely on assertions with just as little substance, if not even less than those of the Religion they mock: relying as they do on confusion on the very topic, fallacies, hasty generalities and ignorance as to the nature of Religion.