"What is marriage more than a label? Would there be a difference between rights of people who have a marriage or who have a civil union? In some countries the government does not know (and does not care) who marries or civil unions who."

And in some countries they do. There are legal differences, as you must know.

Either the two concepts should be completely merged, or one or the other abandoned. It is against conscience to single out one group as having less rights than another.

I favour keeping the word "marriage", since that is what everyone already knows. However, I don't have strong feelings one way or the other; marriage could be made into some kind of church thing like baptism and the legal institution of partnership replaced with civil unions; that would also be OK. What is not OK is the current state of affairs.

Anyway, I'm not trying to enter into a discussion about words and labels. I was simply presenting a recent example of one group of people basically persecuting another based upon their unsubstantiated "faith", as evidence that private beliefs are not always harmless.

"The point is exactly that the CC is the highest non-governmental donor of aid. You can criticise than, but per person the Catholic church gives more aid than most secular and humanist NGOs."

And my point is that this is not a valid argument, since there is no control scenario in which the Catholic Church does not exist so that we can compare whether the outcome absent their existence is better or worse.

Anyway I'm not trying to convince you that there's no good Christians - of course there are! And there are good Muslims too, and good atheists. People act altruistically because of basic tendency and social conditioning. There is no reason why this conditioning has to have a religious theme. In fact, I suspect the religious overtones of many charities actually hinder the aid they receive and deliver. However, I'm not an expert and that's kind of beyond the scope of what I am trying to say.

I can't really respond to your statements about the CC's influence in Uganda or whereever, as I'm not an expert. One doesn't need to be an expert, however, to recognise that insisting that contraception is evil can hardly help the AIDS situation in developing countries.

The CC might put in a lot of effort counteracting the effects of its dictats against contraception, and those efforts might indeed be somewhat successful. But why speak against contraception in the first place? If they really want to do good, encourage contraception and put in the work! But no, their strict "faith" comes first, before mere lives.

This kind of thing taints everything they do. The schools they build teach the bible. The hospitals have paintings of Mother Mary, as if to imply that God or his chosen ones are the reason some poor uneducated sap is being cured. All the "aid" has strings. And the problems in Africa have not been solved, or even helped, by any of this.

Yes, the Catholic Church has educated and healed, albeit tainted by an expansionist undercurrent of religious instruction, fueled by its prodigious wealth. So has the Wahhabist regime of Saudi Arabia, funded by its own oil riches. I can't deny the localised reductions in suffering. But I can assert that, long term, relying on expansionist religions to meet the needs of the poor while indoctrinating the natives is not the answer.

The secular world should do better.

"Or if someone tells you to make peace? Religion has both positive and negative influences – just like any other ideology (e.g. communism)."

Someone given divine power to preach for peace also has the ability to preach for war. Power should not be arbitrarily assigned like this.

But yes, religion is but a subset of blind idealogy. Plenty of evil has been done in the name of others, like you say.

"Religious people were fairly well persecuted in the name of state Atheism (e.g. ex-Soviet Union, China)."

And atheists have been persecuted in the name of other state idealogies. I don't see what this proves. Totalitarian states choose their "enemies of the people" according to what fits their needs, or that can whip up some cheap approval from segments of the population.

At least state atheism is defensible. A war on religion sounds to me like a war on illiteracy. State religion is much nastier. Ask a homosexual in Iran.

This is all besides the point, though, really. Arguing about the details is a waste of time. The fact is, convincing large numbers of people that Santa Claus exists and is judging their actions so they better be good might well have some positive effects, but it's still completely fucking wrong and the world should have moved on by now.

"As I said, everyone has irrational beliefs (e.g. Humanism). Your moral basis is probably built on several irrational beliefs."

The difference is that if you can identify a logical hole in any of my beliefs, I'll not only welcome the discussion, but congratulate you for correcting me. Good luck doing that for anyone who has purposefully abandoned all logic and reason and instead thrown themselves at the mercy of a phantom god they read about in a mistranslated 2,000 year old book written by and for uneducated sheep herders in Palestine.

And if we accept that indoctrinating the lower classes in fake idealogies in order to control them and make them behave better is in fact a good thing, then perhaps we need to design a new, improved religion, without any of the problems from the past.

Anyway, look, this conversation is going nowhere. You are never, ever going to convince me that religion is a Good Thing and I probably won't convince you otherwise either. I've given up on trying to "turn" people, and writing a decent argument takes an awful lot of time. Let's leave it there.