Being a former Christian, I have a right to expound on dogma and high ritual in the churches, comparing the old-time religion of the 50s and 60s with today's megachurched world of air conditioned dog houses and preachers with summer homes in California.  So let me borrow a snippet of a local TV newscast about some people who are angry that the murderer of a friend is free on bail and awaiting the friend's "justice." They were shown in a Catholic church praying for retribution. 

Yep, they were praying to God to destroy the accused.  Before a jury hears facts.  

If anything sounds wrong with this then perhaps you, like me, have a certain post-enlightenment "nostalgia for religion," to quote the late Pier Paolo Pasolini, famous for his black and white gritty docudrama, The Gospel According to St. Matthew.  I don't know about Pasolini, but my own nostalgia for religion finds current Christianity abhorrent and certainly counter to the interpretation of the canonicals I learned in 12 hours of religion in college.  Was I wrong to assume that a person who advises turning the other cheek would ask followers to forgive even the homicidal, for theirs, too, is the Kingdom of Heaven.  But here are these people praying to the same God to smite a person out of good old-fashioned revenge.  Their participation in such an obscenity inside a church is just mind-boggling.

Abraham Maslow wrote that religious people babble rote nonsense when they go to services. Most know nothing about their religion except basics: it's been shown that atheists have more acquaintance with the bible than most Christians.  Maslow thought that people go for social, business, and political reasons than because they genuinely believe in something they know little about.  How many of them know that Leviticus forbids shellfish?  They aren't going to synagogue.  For that matter, as George Carlin observed, why honor with worship a God who tells women to cover their head in a cathedral but never cover the head in a synagogue?  A God that fickle, that arbitrary, that capricious...isn't worth worshiping.  He's worth forgetting.