We are currently reaping the fields sown by our religions...this is what religion gets us.  Humanity will be forever mired in this current status quo of hatred and distrust and warfare until we can grow out of our need for superstition.  To my great dismay for the future of every person born from this day forward, I don't honestly see this happening before we annihilate ourselves.  It is also astounding how tenaciously we hold onto our religions in the face of insurmountable scientific evidence to the contrary.  Of course, the debate of evolution vs. creationism is the most famous...the weight of evidence proving evolution to be a written-in-stone (a religiously originated phrase, a la Moses and the Ten Commandments) fact of life (literally) is greater than the evidence supported practically any other scientific theory.  Don't get pulled into the snake-oil sales tactic trap of misrepresenting the scientific term "theory" - all scientific ideas are permanently theories, because science is always willing (more or less) to change it's opinions in the face of new evidence, hence, it is presumed that nothing can truly be defined as absolute, capital "T" Truth, because the door has to be open to change the theory in light of any new evidence that is found.  For example, the theory of heliocentrism presumes that the Earth orbits the sun, and not vice-versa as we originally thought.  The Catholic church was particularly perturbed by this concept, and kept it squelched for some time.  However, the preponderance of scientific evidence was so great that the church could no longer resist, and officially acknowledged that the sun did not actually rotate around the Earth, but that the reverse was true.  Today, no sane person doubts the veracity of the theory of heliocentrism - we commonly consider it to be a "fact" because of the totality and certainty of the evidence we've collected to support it.  Have you ever doubted the concept, after, say, junior high school science classes educated you on the subject?  Of course not - it would not be rational to do so.  Why then is it rational to doubt the theory of evolution, with all of it's vast collections of overpoweringly convincing supporting evidence?  Well, it's not - but, it conflicts with the creation myths of every religion that has one (virtually all religions have a creation myth).  Simply put, the concept that life evolved into different species from an original spark of life rather than from the finger of God (or Gods, or whatever) are so diametrically opposed, they cannot be intermingled.  The Bible says God created man, then created all the animals, and then created Eve by pulling out one of Adam's ribs (presumably to save on raw materials usage, or something).  Therefore, any evidence that any other process is responsible for the origin of species (sounds like a good book title, that does!) is obviously, simply, wrong.  Total denial.  Evolution cannot be true, because it contradicts the Bible.  Christians are banned from believing in evolution, or they are not Christians.  I understand that the papacy has gone so far as to recognize that evolution does indeed drive speciation among a similar "kind" (i.e. cats or dogs or whales), but that it cannot generate a new "kind" (i.e. only God can create the original platypus, but evolution could be responsible for variations on the platypus theme).  But, there they stop - and they have particular problems with the notion that man descended from monkeys (pardon my vernacular).  The problem here, in particular, is that the evolutionary fossil record in support of evolution is far more complete and compelling for the humans-from-primates lineage than any other, which really peeves off "creation scientists" - which, in case you're wondering, is the most profound oxymoron ever conceived.

At any rate, the point I'm trying (long-windedly, my apologies) is that humanity is completely bought-in to religion even in the face of totally contradictory, overwhelming scientific evidence - we are amazingly willing to launch into total, irrational, denial of said evidence ("if I ignore it, maybe it will go away").  Think of these things that you must throw out if you are a Christian - aside from evolution, first of all you must totally dismiss the idea that the Earth (indeed, the universe) is very old - despite mountainous volumes of evidence showing the Earth is billions of years old, the Bible is generally interpreted to indicate that the Earth is somewhere in the neighborhood of only 6,000 years old.  A minor discrepancy to say the least.  Fossils - remnants of extinct dinosaurs and such?  Of course not - they were planted there by Satan to deceive us - or, by God to test our faith.  Not only is there no mention of dinosaurs in the Bible, but since man and all animals were created at the same time, it must obviously be false that such beasts could have lived hundreds of millions of years before the first humans.  Besides, the Earth didn't even exist that long ago.  How about physics in general?  We all accept that the pinpoints of lights that we see in the night sky are light waves that have been traveling for eons to get to us.  Not so - since the entire universe was created all at the same time, only a few thousand years ago, it is patently false that these beams of light could have been traveling for more than those few thousand years - obviously, God created the universe with those rays of light already on their way to us, so that we would perceive them as being ancient when they really weren't.  Which eventually gets into a huge hullabaloo about how God created all these seemingly ancient artifacts to actively deceive us into believing that the Earth and the universe are so old...and God will only admit into Heaven those humans who display enough irrationality to blatantly ignore such evidence as their own eyes see, evidently.

All of these concepts you must deny if you are a Christian - because the Bible says so.  As I have noted before, we do have a tendency to pick and choose what parts of the Bible we want to abide by, but these issues are so fundamental to the Christian mythology (theology, whatever) that they cannot be put aside so - Christians must take them head-on, and in these cases, they are completely without a foot to stand on.

Upcoming scientific revelations could bring these issues to a point of ignition within our own cultures - you've no doubt heard accounts of evidence supporting the idea that live might not actually have begun originally on this planet at all, but rather biological material was brought to this planet from somewhere "out there."  It is commonly held now that it isn't reasonable to doubt that life exists elsewhere in the universe - perhaps our original genes were brought to us by a comet or asteroid.  It's now been shown that organic chemistry can occur even in the near absolute-zero near-vacuum of space itself, not even needing to be on a relatively warm planet.  Consider for the moment the possibility that microbes will be discovered in an asteroid, or on Mars - what would be the impact of that revelation on religion?  The very concept that life needn't have begun on Earth at all - worse still, fathom the consequences of discovering that the genetic "fingerprint" of said microbe turns out to be the base code of all Earth life...the original organism that spawned all the fauna and flora of the Earth (or even part of it).  The discovery would be absolutely revolutionary - and just might be enough for Christianity to finally declare it's own holy war against the scientific infidels who deign to disprove entirely the word of God that He created life originally on the Earth 6,000 years ago.  Science is open to change - religion is not.  Agnostics will accept evidence that God exists, but religious people will not accept evidence that undermines the very foundation of their beliefs.