If a person is not filthy, how can he be forgiven? There's a difference between an acknowledgement of evil, or an alignment in support of evil, and the forsaking of it. When I damn for their actions, you may critique the decision : that has not happened.
our only real experience is through observation and thought, which can equally substantiate the idea that physical reality is the only thing just as easily as the idea that physical reality does not exist. We know only that our minds "are," physical or not, and from there it's conjecture based on experience (which may or may not be self generated etc). Truth may exist clearly and physically, or it may exist only in our desire for it to.
in my perception of reality (lol), I believe in God. People who believe in God are Religious. I do not murder. I do not believe in dragons or miracles. Therefor, if someone says that religious people murder and believe in dragons and I do not, they are mistaken, the issue of dragons does not define religion as a whole and to say so is false. From where i stand (and it may be subjective) that looks like math.
The issue at hand for me was never the idea that select Religious people worship dragons and say no to science, but the idea that we all do, and that it is central to a belief in God for all who feel themselves to be have such.
And I won't pretend that jokes about religion and science can't be funny : an hour ago my literary studies professor digressed to a poster of "darwin versus god" claiming the big showdown between a televangelist and a gorilla was to happen sunday sunday sunday at the staples center. He thought it would be better with gabriel versus the monkey because gabriel has a sword and can fly. I found the whole thing hilarious, mostly because it involved monkeys and a parody of WWF, because it didn't tell me that my faith necessarily involved a belief in televangelists or that gabriel would use his sword on a monkey. A joke about Noah leaving behind the dinosaurs and unicorns is also funny, because it doesn't come out and say that I and all religious people believe firmly that Noah lived with dinosaurs. In fact, if the players had been "I am science" and "I am a Biblical Literalist who believes in stories to which there definitive, contradictory evidence," I might have laughed.