No, that’s just your stereo type of them. Applying a label to a HUGE group of people based on your experience with just a few.
That makes no more sense than saying being black means being a violent, poor, gang member who doesn’t care about the law and sells drugs, or that being gay means anonymous sex in the park and AIDS, or that being liberal means you are a communist, or that a conservative is racist, etc etc.
To answer the OP, it was given to (my view) or developed by human beings.
There is a finite number of people. Religions are competing for them. The financial and political wellbeing of the religion is at stake. The religions morph into something different than was intended to compete successfully. The more politically active they become,the less religious they are.
The bozos have always been there just as they have been in every other group. The problem is that many of the intelligent, rational people have left. Religious groups have done an awful job evolving into organizations that can attract modern thinkers and other talented people. How many smart people do you know that study scripture and go to church every week? Does anyone know someone who wants to become a priest? That’s not to say there aren’t any, just that many potential leaders gravitate towards other things. The same thing has happened (to a lesser extent) to the military and the GOP. No matter how you feel about the institutions, it’s a bad thing that they are being radicalized, and that the beneficial aspects and ideas are not there to be appreciated.
The other thing is that religious leaders have allowed their values to politicized in a trivial and exploitative way. Just compare Gandhi and MLK Jr., and James Dobson and Jerry Falwell. Far more people can get behind a message of instilling an appreciation for the gravity of a marriage commitment than for preventing gays from getting married. I think many religious people believe both things, but there was little outrage when people were getting divorced by the truck load.
Popular religion is focused more on division than communion. As our society becomes more diverse, that kind of divisiveness becomes corrosive. They’ve allowed all of their morals and values to co-opted and commodified by people with questionable agendas. When you do that, all you are gonna have left is the true believers.
This book has been thoroughly debunked.
Cite?
Politics. It infests every discipline — religion, government, science, the arts, etc. Men want to control other men, and they’ll use whatever they find useful.
Christianity has had the same policy toward homosexuality for over two thousand years. The specific attitude toward abortion has not been quite as consistent for all that time, but the church has always opposed abortion. What has changed is that some people realized it is easier to get judges to issue rulings than persuade people to vote for your preferred policies. Christians then thought that since the US is a democracy they should engage with the political process to try to get politicians who agree with them elected in order to change the policies back to ones which agree with their values. Those who oppose them have preferred to call disagreement hate and to call names rather than debate or engage in the political process to achieve compromise.
Christianity has not been hijacked, rather Christians have reacted to changed circumstances.
and
Same citeas before - not quite true.
Also stated differently here. Attention to the 5th through 16th centuries please.
Careful with the "always"es. 
That does not demonstrate what you said.
First, you linked to a 5- month period of salaries. Second, you asserted McCain pays his women more than the male counterparts when, in fact, he paid his LD (a woman) $11k less (14%) than Obama paid his COS (a man). Both were the highest paid Congressional employee. Most Chiefs of Staff that I checked made more than McCain’s. Obama also paid his LD $10k+ more than McCain.
You also forgot that both Obama and McCain had been on the campaign trail at the pay time period you linked to. That’s why McCain’s previously highest paid staff member, Mark Salter, is not on the congressional payroll. Either way, I don’t think a snap shot of their staff payroll proves anything.
(A related story. A friend of mine went to Clown College somewhere in Florida. She reported that it was run by born-again Christians. So the OP has it backwards. Clowning has been taken over my the Christians.)
This is an overstatement; but it’s true, and it makes me very sad, that so many people’s view of Christianity is this, or is something like Der Trihs’s. This is not the Christianity I know, and certainly not the Christ I know. Unfortunately, it’s not the people who are humbly and quietly trying to be like Jesus, and follow him and serve him and live according to his teachings, that get the most attention.
(“The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”)
As for how Christianity got “hijacked by bozos,” whole books could be (and have been) written on the subject. One such is Bruce Bawer’s Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity. Though I can’t recommend it unreservedly, for reasons that some of the Amazon reviewer’s touch on, it makes some good points.
Probably a poor choice of terminology. It is Islam that has been hijacked. And naturally, nobody has any problem at all condemning Islam as a whole on the basis of its attention-seeking screwballs.
Christianity, for the record, has been “shanghaied.”
Christianity took three centuries to become a warring religion. Islam became that with its founder.
As much as I love them neither St. Augustine nor St. Thomas can be cited as absolute evidence of what the Catholic Church believed or believes. They can lend weight, but they had no absolute authority.
The pope is a little better, but please keep in mind that the mammalian ovum was not even discovered until 1826 and points to a somewhat lacking understanding of human development pre-birth.
The Church has always opposed abortion, but a better understanding of the development of human life has allowed her to refine her position as time has moved on.
Women used to have to wear a head covering to Mass; now it’s red foam noses the ushers distribute at the door.
All major religions have a certain % of “Bozos”. The Moslem faith IMHO has even a higher % of extremists that the Christian faith, but even Judaism has it share of out there wierd extremists.
As for tolerence of Homosexuality, Islam is by far the least tolerant:
http://www.religioustolerance.org/hom_isla.htm
According to the International Lesbian and Gay Association ILGA there are at least seven countries today which still retain capital punishment for homosexuality: Afghanistan, Iran, Mauritania, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Yemen. The situation with regard to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is unclear.
Most mainstream large religions are not very tolerant of Homosexuality or Abortion. In Hinduism Gay tolerance and acceptance varies widely, as you’d expect with that form of Faith.
It seems like Buddhism is about the most tolerant, but we can also debate whether Buddhism is a religion or a Philosphy.
But even so
http://kenyangay.blogspot.com/2007/06/does-buddhism-accept-homosexuality.html
"*Dennis Conkin, a retired newspaper reporter is one who holds an opposing view on the same and he writes in his 1997 article “Dalai Lama Urges ‘Respect, Compassion, and Full Human Rights for All,’ Including Gays”:
“Buddhist sexual proscriptions ban homosexual activity and heterosexual sex through orifices other than the vagina, including masturbation or other sexual activity with the hand…From a Buddhist point of view, lesbian and gay sex is generally considered sexual misconduct.”*
Moderate-Liberal Christianity is actually quite tolerant of Homosexuality, even having Gay Ministers.
So, the OP’s premise is based upon bias and ignorance.
No. It’s because religiosity, specifically Christian religiosity, has become a litmus test by which all candidates are judged.
Color me as one of those unhappy that the Democrats have fallen into the trap of trying to out-religious the Republicans
I was thinking Fred Phelps or Bishop Spong - but this was better.
Threads like this give atheism a bad name. We’ve got the LDS over here, encouraging its members to donate money to take away the rights of gays, and the Episcopalians over there, risking their very church on supporting those rights.
This is the moral equivalent of Bricker not voting for Obama based on the actions of nutjobs who might claim to support him. Let’s accept or not accept Christianity or any other religion on evidence and logic, not on who claims to be for it.
I would say you’re conveniently forgetting to include all the social restrictions that are solely promoted by the Religious Right and their surrogates in the Republican party, within all levels of the local, state, and national governmental apparatus. It’s a false assertion that the Republican party of today, currently controlled in large measure by a social conservative element, wants government out of our lives, and smaller. If you take away their penchant and love for deregulation, everything remaining screams out that they want to be in as much of everyone’s personal lives as humanly possible.
If Republicans loved free will so much homosexuals would be able to get married everywhere, women would have complete control over their biology, non-Christians wouldn’t be constantly compared to and treated as evil incarnate, our immigration policy wouldn’t have a decidedly racist scent to it, and we wouldn’t start ridiculous and illegal wars to take what’s not ours and attempt to justify the killing of people who didn’t do a damned thing to us.