Is religion losing it's grip on America?

The Inquisition: This one I'll agree with. It was a violent reaction by the Roman Catholic hierarchy to The Reformation, which threatened their political hold on Europe.

Holocaust: Hitler, a believer in the Nordic gods, used Jews as a straw man to blame. Non-religious Jews nor even Atheist Jews were exempt. Gypsies were treated the same as Jews. NOT FOR RELIGIOUS REASONS.

The Crusades: @800 AD, The "Holy Land" or "Levant" was predominantly Christian with a large Jewish segment, under control of The Byzantine Empire, when Muslim military forces from Arabia invade and take control. The peace treaty stipulates that Christian Pilgrims from the West and North will be protected and the "Holy Sites" will remain under Christian control. @ 850 AD Muslim highwaymen rob and kidnap European tourists (pilgrims) on a regular basis. Unable to get the New Caliph to protect the pilgrims, the Popes ordered three crusades over a period of two centuries. Finally Richard Coeur d;Leon and S'Allahdin Sign a truce in which Roman Catholic forces withdraw and Muslim forces guarantee protection of Holy sites and Pilgrims, except for the Temple Mount which falls into Muslim hands.

9/11: Ordered by Osama BinLaden, a Wahabi Muslim who is a strict follower of the Qur'an, which tells Muslims to conquer the world and place it all under Sharia. More than a religion, Sharia is a legal code and a way of living.

Of all the religions on earth, only one major one is not really a religion so much as it is a political system dedicated to violence and world conquest. Don't blame every religion for the shortcoming of one that is very different from the others.

I’m sure that you are aware that by taking scripture out context unscrupulous leaders have corrupted believers who were unable to read the scriptures for themselves, or in modern times are too lazy to study on their own, ala Jim Jones and David Koresh. Yet anyone who calls himself a Christian should, by definition, put the words of Christ before the words of Moses or David. Also, when you study the Old Testament you can easily see that, as unfair as it seems to us, God gave the twelve tribes the authority to conquer the land of Canaan. He never gave any Caliph or Pope the same authority.
I personally choose to obey “the greatest commandment” as quoted by Jesus to a questioning Pharisee over the old Mosaic code. If I were a Hebrew, I would still follow Jesus as did the original disciples, who were all Jewish.
As for lifestyle choices, I see three competing lifestyles vying for world dominance, (1) Limited government, free enterprise, with God given inalienable citizens’ rights and freedom of movement, representative democracy, with a very limited social safety net, (2) a State Controlled planned economy based on Fabian socialism including redistribution of wealth, with limited citizens’ rights granted by the state and (3) Feudal tribalism overseen by a religions leader (a Caliph) and ruled by religious judges using a social code established in the Dark Ages, enforced by extreme violence and religiously sanctioned overt terrorism. Some people would add laissez-faire capitalism and State run communism to this list, but I believe that most historians would agree that those systems have proven themselves to be destructive and ultimately doomed to failure. As for me, I choose number (1). How about you?

I agree about regulating trade. Unregulated capitalism is “laizzez-faire”, meaning “leave it go” capitalism. But if government is the source of our freedoms, then government has every right to rescind those privileges. Whether Moses and the early prophets made it up as a justification for genocide, who can be sure? We’re arguing over something that happened almost 4000 years ago, when bronze was high tech, stone tools were still prevalent, and a rare few people were even literate. Even Jesus in his teachings does not refer to that period. He often quotes Daniel, Isaiah and Elijah. The early bronze-age was replete with brutal tribal warfare. I had no say in establishing the biblical cannon. I may have left out some books and included others. And unlike fundamentalists, I do not take what is there as literal or even correct. As a Christian I do take the New Testament seriously and I put more weight on the books that Jesus cited, including 1 Enoch which was only made cannon by the Abyssinian Christian Church.
I see Christianity as being one of the greatest ”civilizing” influences over a brutal and barbaric world, in spite of its occasional lapses into barbarism itself.
I do have some problems with my own faith but I’m asking God to help me with those questions.
You should read What Ben Franklin, obviously a free thinker in “The Age of Reason” had to say about Christianity:.
Ben Franklin's Creed: The American Religion
To Ezra Stiles, 9 March 1790 (B 12:185-6):
You desire to know something of my religion. It is the first time I have been questioned upon it. But I cannot take your curiosity amiss, and shall endeavor in a few words to gratify it. Here is my creed. I believe in one God, the creator of the universe. That he governs by his providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable service we render to him is doing good to his other children. That the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental points in all sound religion, and I regard them as you do in whatever sect I meet with them.
As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think his system of morals and his religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have, with most of the present dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity; though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble. I see no harm, however, in its being believed, if that belief has the good consequences, as probably it has, of making his doctrines more respected and more observed; especially as I do not perceive that the Supreme takes it amiss, by distinguishing the unbelievers in his government of the world with any peculiar marks of his displeasure.
The Works of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Putnam’s, 1904)

The BIG difference is that the Bible contains books written by many Prophets, scribes and apostles and ends with the teachings of Jesus as expressed through his apostles, the Qur’an was dictated by one man, who claimed to be the final arbiter of all things monotheistic. He was a man of violence and of domination who thought nothing of murdering thousands of unarmed captives and of ordering his men to rape thousands of women and girls in only one day, This attitude is clearly displayed in the pages of his book, To interpret Jihad as the daily struggle to remain faithful, to pray on time, to practice ritual washing, etc. is not the full meaning of jihad. Anyone who reads the Qur’an can see that.

Islam recognizes prophets prior to Mohammed of Mecca, one is Isa of Nazareth, and we know what his teachings were. Every day I pray that more and more Muslims will recognize that to follow Jesus is not unislamic, and to ask themselves if God/Allah would have really chosen an egotistical, narcissistic murderer and rapist as his prophet, and then not insist that he change his ways.

I have many Muslim friends and acquaintances. I grew up with Syrian and Egyptian friends. I am even friends with some of the Jarrahs. I even learned a little Arabic. Some of my “Muslim” friends still Identify as Islamic but have accepted Jesus. They can’t say they have renounced Islam, for fear of a death fatwah, and in reality they are still Muslims (Obedient to God), they’re just technically speaking not Mohammedans (Followers of Mohammed).

C’mon now I know you’re smarter that this. Read again what I wrote. “in Europe from 400 to 1600.
The Romans absorbed the Greek Selucid Empire before the CE and by 400 CE the Romans were on the way out and Gothic, Germanic, Slavic and Mongol tribes held sway in Europe and soon after, even in Rome itself.
These “barbarians” wrecked most of what the Romans had built and were only interested in power, land and wealth, not science art and learning. Europe fell into a dark age of brutality and illiteracy.
Basically the Christian enclaves and monasteries kept learning and literacy alive. This is why the word “clerical” means both religious order and record keeping, today. Christianity was the one uniting factor among educated/civilized people in dark-age Europe. As Christianity gradually spread, so did literacy and creative thought.
I explained the Crusades in a previous post in this thread. They were a brutal reaction to brutal actions and were unfortunately as ignorantly executed as the ignorant illiterate soldiers and warriors who fought them. Anyway, they were not conducted in Europe, but in the middle-east. Of the the 1200 year span I mentioned the Crusades were less than 300 of them anyway, and had little real effect on life in Europe with a few exceptions like Arabic (actually Indian) numbers including “zero”, whish made math much easier to do.
Remember that the Caliphate was attacking the Byzantines and gradually conquering all those Christian lands at the same time, and Islamic forces cross at Gibralter and conquered as far as the outskirts of Paris by around 700 CE. It took the political power of the Church to pool enough manpower for Charles Martel, the king of Gaul to turn the tables in France and force the Moors to retreat into Spain. Are you aware that it took The Spanish crown until 1492 to finally rid Spain of its Moorish conquerors? It was the war in Spain that brought about the creation of the Spanish Inquisition, which went on to fight against the Reformation (one of my listed heroes is Jan Huss, an early reformer burned at the stake during the Reformation). Also do not forget that it took the son of Charles Martel, “Charlemagne” to defeat the Muslims at the gates of Vienna then push them back to the Balkans and Greece. And men like he and Vlad Tepesch (Dracula) to drive them back into Asia Minor, Turkey (Formerly a part of Greece; read the epistles.)
Without the Church to arrange financing and logistics, Europe would have fallen under Sharia Law of the Umiad Caliphate and later the Ottoman Caliphate. No Renaissance, no Reformation, no Age of Reason, just oppression, abusing women, institutionalized slavery and jihad, more and more conquests for Allah.
Those who will not learn from the mistakes of the past are doomed to relive them.

I agree on the heavy-handedness of the Roman Catholic Church during the Middle Ages and even until the late nineteenth century. I think Roman Catholicism is still operating in so much Biblical error that it’s hard to find the Christianity amid all of its Pagan and invented practices. That being said even at it’s worst it didn’t come close to the social repression and slavery under the Caliphates. And never was it used militarily except to ’defend the faith’. Remember the Crusades were Defensive wars. The Levant was Christian, a part of the Byzantine (Eastern Roman, run from Constantinople) Empire when Islamic forces came in from Arabia and conquered it, forcing most of the local inhabitants to convert to Islam at the point of a sword. Even then The Roman Church did nothing until the Caliphate appointed a Mufti over Jerusalem who abrogated the treaty agreement to protect Christian pilgrims visiting the Holy sites. He allowed them to be robbed, murdered, raped and even held for ransom. Holy-Land tours were a source of income for locals in the Galilee and Judea, but the new Mufti put his religion ahead of his need for revenue and the caliph did not correct him. We’re not talking about a dozen pilgrims murdered and raped; we’re talking about thousands from important religious families in Europe.
You know that the Reformation changed Western European Christianity to a more Bible based and basic form. It even forcer the Roman Catholic church to make Changes. It reduced its political control to France Switzerland and Italy. The French Revolution ended it’s power in France and the Papal wars of the late 19th century drove it out of Switzerland and all of Italy but the Vatican where it remains.
All the bragging Muslims do about inventing algebra, the use of zero in math and the use of ten numerals are bogus because these concepts were taken from the Byzantines and from the cultures in India and the other regions that they conquered. The Caliphate spread across Africa and Central Asia like the Borg on Star Trek, assimilating other peoples and their technologies into their strict lifestyle. What they knew of astronomy came from capturing Persia and converting Zoroastrian astronomers.
Don’t just believe all the propaganda that Iran and the Saudis feed to western academics. Read older history texts that aren’t tainted with modern political ideologies too.