Christians claim that the wrong ideas can make people do the most sinful and evil things. But as Blaise Pascal, the french mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic theologian put it so astutely, " Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." This truism, which has been demonstrated quite well throughout history, would make religion qualify as perhaps the most "wrong idea" humanity has ever come up with, to everyone but those who believe in religion, of course. It just so happens that it is precisely because people believe in the ultimate righteousness of their religions - be they be made of gods, governments, or gold (which are all really three sides of the same thing, when you think about it) - that men can be made to "do evil so completely and so cheerfully." Indeed, if the devil was even only a fraction as clever as his reputation suggests, he would have figured out that the bes...