Religion is not that black and white. In Christianity one large part of the teaching is coming to terms with the fact that everyone, christians and non-christians included, are "sinners".
If you "lost your membership" if you didn't adhere to the "fundemental beliefs" (I'll just go along with this for now), then nobody could call themselves a Christian.
but then again what is wrong with that? I personally find no problem with not having to associate myself with a group of people. That's just me though
And It is obvious what kind of image the fundemental christian provides. America has lots of examples. Once again though, GAF should know better than to judge an entire group by the actions of some. As far as I'm concerned, taking the "90% of people who identify by religion are just ignorant cave-dwellers" stance is the easy thing to do. The harder thing to do is to try to figure out why so many people choose to follow religion. Not everyone is an idiot. People can think for themselves and it's insulting to them to say they don't because of a simple religious belief.
Choosing to be part of a group, in this case religion, does not grant that choice immunity from insult or ridicule. Why should it? Why should religion get protection when other choices are equally up for criticism?
What people seem to really want is they get to call themselves a member of a group and that membership to be defined by themselves, not the group. In other words, I represent the entirety of the religion, and those bad ones, well, they don't count and therefore you cannot criticize the religion.
Here's another way to illustrate this. If you think religious choice should be protected, then atheism is also a religious choice. As such you should be defending atheists from insult and ridicule as well. Have you ever done this?