All of which are contrary to religious fundamentalism... which worries me as a US citizen.
All of which are contrary to religious fundamentalism... which worries me as a US citizen.
The type of news that fundamentalists end up making also isn't all that discouraging, they are usually losing court cases where they tried to inject their beliefs into public life.
Also depending on how you draw your lines, the Catholics aren't even remotely close to #1 status. About 24% of Americans are Catholic while about 51% are Protestants. I'll agree that it's a little iffy, but I'm willing to count the Protestants as a singular group.
Perhaps I'm just jaded because I live in the land of "lets turn the US into a Christian theocracy".
When I said the Catholics were the largest group, I was treating the protestants as separate groups. Mostly because if you are treating "fundamentalist" as an axis, the protestants don't really group together. They even tend to be somewhat polarized across that axis.
I mean, sure, there have been some pretty horrible things done in the name of religion, often by fundamentalists. There have been some even more horrible things done in the name of atheistic philosophies, too. But religious fundamentalism should give one an idea that certain things really are morally wrong, and that you're therefore not supposed to do them. That sounds like "self-control" and "moral sense" to me...
--
The premise that religiosity in any way influences morality (or "self control") is a joke. We live in a world where religious people are performing (or attempting to perform) genocides, who rape children (and adults), and who are subjugating the current out-group. We also live in a world where non-religious people are providing healthcare to the poor, counselling to the abused, and food to the needy. There are, of course, plenty of counterexamples where religious people are acting morally, and non-religious are acting amorally... all this just goes to show that there are moral people and those who are not moral, not that religion has any influence over that morality.
To further the point, the vast majority of religious people (at least in the "Western Religion" sense) go out of their way to cherry pick which of their holy book's rules to adhere to. This is because they have decided to act in a way that they, and their society, have deemed moral; despite what the book has told them was.
Pol Pot killed one quarter of Cambodia's population in the name of communism, which was explicitly atheistic. So far as I know, that is the ruler that killed the single largest fraction of his own population. (Stalin killed more people, but he had a much larger population to work with. And, surprise, Stalin also did it in the name of communism.)