How has religion influenced your life?

Religion is bad. It taught me to hate others not like me.

Christianity is good. Christ taught me to love everyone.

No Dr. Jazz, it is not religion, it is A religion, as in, one of many. I am saying religion in general is bad. Christ is one man who has been misquoted to make horrible things come about.

I went to a Catholic school. Entered as a deist at 12, left as an atheist at 17. It was directly related to what I learned/witnessed at said school.

Does that count?

What a great question.
I have thought about religion vs. my life with God. religion seems to be all about what is wrong with human nature ... we separate ourselves into clans and then fight. We pray that God will be on our side in a battle: as though God would want to see us in war. We pray to a God whose religion tells us how to love, how to have sex, who to marry, who to enslave. Parts of the bible say killing is wrong: yet, other parts tell us God ordered the deaths of men, women and children and the burning of their cities.
So -- religion made me think for myself. Meditate and ask for guidance from the Spirits.
I follow no religious tenets now: but am closer to God than at any other point in my 65-year life. But I had to think for myself; invent my own rules about who/what God is and why that was important to me.

I would say religion is one of the major problems the USA has now and we have not learned to deal with intelligently. When people learn to love as God demonstrates to us, we will be better for it.

It's preventing me from attending my sister Jacki's wedding. she cannot get married because of christian supremacists fucking with the constitution