While I'm not particularly religious these days, I come from a deeply religious family and went through a spiritualist phase. I'd like there to be something after death, but there probably isn't anything. While US christians probably don't do much for their faith, their faith is their right and to me there's a worrying trend to have no respect for people's beliefs whatsoever. The real reason I'm posting this is because I get frustrated time and time again with people equating stupid religious people with religion as a whole. It's like the Italian government looking at some high profile killings and blaming all Romanians in that it is patently bigoted. If someone believes something that you don't believe then fine, let them believe it. The majority of people I've met who have religioius feelings, and I've met and been friends with people with all sorts of religious backgrounds, are level headed, have strong beliefs and would hardly agree with violence in the name of their religion. Morally and intellectually I respect them, and respect their beliefs. All too often I see people just plain laying into (mostly) christians online. Unfortunately this is obviously only going to lead to teenagers with a bit of fluff in their head spewing out the usual unintelligible vitriol back. There's plenty of Americans out there that have the same fanatacism for the Bush administration (for apparently no good reason) who are far more dangerous than religion. Religion is never going to completely die, it really is a waste of time trying to get it to fall over,
As for the Old Testament/New Testament thing, I'm pretty sure that Jesus said something like "forget about the old laws" in the speech about an eye for an eye and his new commandments, which is why I think what Jesus said takes precedence over anything in the Old Testament, but quite a lot of people seem to forget this. I think the war vs love thing is more indicative of the belief that Jesus was meant to be God's forgiveness and the chance for the rest of the world, whereas God in the Old Testament was just doing what he had to to protect his people in their formative years (Jews). A much better example of this would be fundies being almost militant over homosexuality when Jesus said love thy neighbour. I think that it's worth reading through religious texts, because there is some good stuff in there. There is some bad stuff as well but I refuse to blame terrorism, holy wars, or angry, spotty, teenage nerds raging their face off on their keyboard because someone said being gay might be all right, or some uptight, sexless old person writing letters to her politician because her friend at the last coffee morning told her some film was full of violence, sex and swearing, on religion, because if I did I'd have to blame violence on our society on computer games, violent music, violent art, etc. I don't believe they influence people to do bad things, and I don't think religion influences people to do things, terrible people and voices in their own heads influence people to do terrible things. I'm trying desperately not to get into this any further or get too into specific details, but the crusades are a perfect example of what I'm trying to say.
My 2c.