Cannon Balls and Christians

In the early 1500's, when cannons became better built and larger, they not only brought down castle walls, they also brought down views of the universe that the Catholic church had taught were fact. Aristotle had said the heavens were perfect and unchanging. Everything up there moved in perfect circles because it was the realm of God. Down here on Earth, where things were not perfect, things moved in straight lines. The problem is if you fired a cannon ball it did not shoot out straight and then drop to the ground in another straight line as Aristotle and the holy church said. However, to ask questions about this was heresy.
The irony is that if you were firing on heretics in the service of the church, and you wanted to actually hit them, you used the heretical system of targeting, setting the cannon at 45 degrees and allowing for the curved trajectory of the ball, and not the Church approved Aristotle view, that said such curved motion did not occur on Earth.
Any time religion has made a declaration about the physical universe it ended up being wrong. The planets are not affixed to crystal spheres. The Sun does not revolve around the Earth. Things can move in circles here on the ground and objects in space can sometimes move in straight lines. These rules may seem silly to us now but these were laws. To question them, even with basic observation, as Galileo did, could get you into a lot of trouble.
If religion has been wrong about the physical laws of the universe then there is a good chance it is just as wrong about the spiritual universe, too.

Religion still informs peoples ideas on everything from what you can eat, who you can marry, what is and is not sin, and how to worship. By the way, historically speaking, there is not a Muslim god, a Jewish god or a Christian god. All the arguments stem from the belief that only one of those religions got what God was saying correct and the others are misinterpretations of his word. That's why when I see arguments between religions that boil down to, my dad can beat up your dad, I laugh because its supposedly the same "dad."
To me religion is best looked at like cellphone providers. They all use the same technology and connect to the same place but one says you have kneel on Sundays, one says you have to wear a funny hat and another says you have to face a certain direction to get a "signal." And just like cellphones I imagine most of those conversations are one sided with people saying, "can you hear me?"

There is no consistency in the rules people follow either. Most Christians can trace their belief that homosexuality is wrong to a single passage in the Book of Leviticus written more than 2,000 years ago. The same book tells people not to eat pork or sea food, yet, here in America at least, bacon is treated as a birthright and I've yet to see any conservative Christians protesting a Long John Silvers because of the all you can eat sea food buffet.
The book of Leviticus also has issues with mixing things. For instance, planting two different types of crops in a single field is a sin and wearing garments made from different fabrics is also a sin. Sins, I might ad, that are supposed to be punished by death. That means if someone is wearing a cotton blend T-shirt with the words written on it, "God hates fags" that person, under the rules of their religion and their book, is equally deserving as being killed as someone who is gay. That's how you know people who hate gay people aren't looking to their religion for moral guidance; their looking at it to justify their own hate. Why else would you cherry-pick one passage about one group of people and forget about all the rules around food, clothing and planting?

These people are still "firing the cannon" in a way that is inconsistent with a modern, intelligent and compassionate society.