…Believe it or not, humans in general have been a huge source of actual evil throughout human history. You could probably reasonably argue that Christians and Muslims¹ have contributed enough good that in spite of their evil actions they've probably had a net positive effect on humanity.

Oh, and quite a lot of math and science dates back to Christian and Muslim scholars, so your last sentence is perhaps dismissive of the general intellect of religious folk. As someone rather appreciative of the work of Isaac Newton, Blaise Pascal, Gregor Mendel, a variety of ancient Muslim scholars, and many more, I'm glad they didn't stick to reading fiction.

¹ Who I don't generally group with Christians (the religions, while superficially similar, are pretty different), but I don't have anything against them and I would not consider them “evil”, or at least not more evil than humanity at large.

> Oh, and quite a lot of math and science dates back to pagan Platonic and Vedic philosophers.

FTFY.

You can't conduct religious flamewars here.

Also, please don't create many obscure throwaway accounts on HN. This forum is a community. Anonymity is fine, but users should have some consistent identity that other users can relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community at all, and that would be an entirely different forum.