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Except he didn't make that point; at all. He just name-dropped a theologian, and fabricated a hyperbolic quote out of thin air; in what I assume was an attempt to ridicule Captain X's argument.

What does Thomas Aquinas have to do with Captain X's argument?

I doubt it. The sort of person who would join groups like ISIS or Al Quaida in search of meaning, is just looking for an excuse to do evil to others; regardless of what that excuse is. The only thing Christianity would do, is give them different targets.

I can see your point; perhaps my statement should have instead been phrased that Europe's current problems are not caused by them abandoning Christianity.

Meanwhile, as an agnostic theist, my thoughts are that there's probably some sort of higher power out there, but I thoroughly reject the notion that anyone on this earth has ever known what that higher power is or wants. I mean sure, from a philosophical perspective, there is a lot of value that...

I suppose I can see where you're coming from with that position; but it only holds under said worldview, which I do not share. From my perspective, you're just completely delusional.

I think a distinction needs to be made here between personal religion, and organized religion; and it's the latter that tends to run into such issues as GoldRanger pointed out, as it tends to involve giving a lot of power to a handful of people over the spiritual well-being of others. Actually...

Trust me, everyone thinks they've come to their conclusions rationally; and oftentimes, they're right, from their perspective at least. However you notice how I made a claim, that at least one moral precept of Judaism and Christianity (the Golden Rule), was actually taken from a preceding...

Arguing about religion has always been a pointless endeavor, because you cannot reason with faith. Then again, considering the backfire effect is a thing, there's probably nothing special about that fact in regards to religion; people are already inclined not to believe information that...

That sounds like a pretty transparent attempt at delegitimizing those who came before, by claiming ownership of their ideas after the fact.

Which is an easy assumption to make, for anyone who isn't burdened by the prejudices inherent in being a Jew or a Christian. I mean look at the Golden Rule for example; the Jewish “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor: that is the whole of the Torah, while the rest is...

True, but reality often fails to live up to the ideal; oftentimes, you just have to learn to live with things as they are, rather than how they ought to be. Atheists do tend to get the short end of the stick from religious types (same goes for Agnostics like myself), but that's just par for the...

I really don't want to get into yet another religious argument on this forum; but suffice to say, things are a lot more complicated than you're portraying them.

Speaking as a former atheist, I reject the idea that amorality is an integral component of Athiesim. You do not need to be religious, let alone Christian, to have a functional moral framework and know that deploying chemical weapons against innocent people is wrong!

By that logic, we could blame basically anything that happened around the time the decline started, or even claim that the opposite is the case; that instead of "forsaking god" causing the decline, the decline caused them to "forsake god". Correlation does not imply causation.