@Qingu, great answer, as usual. You never cease to amaze me, and your presence on Fluther is a godsend (so to speak).
I do want to add that recent events have shown what religion can do to politics, at least indirectly. The Republican party became the Christian party over the last couple of decades, and then of course (as it always does) the pendulum swung the other way. Remember the line-up of Republican hopefuls for the nomination? How many of them were outspoken religionists? Yet, the guy who got the nod was a moderate Republican with no outspoken religious beliefs. A guy most Christian Republicans weren’t ready to vote for, a man by the name of McCain. He is a Christian, but he doesn’t seem willing to shove it down your throat, not like Mr. Huckabee did. (How silly do the words President Huckabee sound?)
Some of the more hard core conservatives threatened to vote for Obama when McCain got the nomination, which struck me as ironically funny. Nowadays, the Republican party is pretty much a joke, and doesn’t seem to have the power it once did. I blame that on the Christian fundamentalist detour the party took for awhile.
While religion and politics are heavily influencial on each other, I think that they are also detrimental to each other, given when one or the other makes demands the other cannot uphold.
And yeah, the fact that the fundamentalists, especially those that call themselves Christian Reconstructionists, want to remake this country into a theocracy, only goes to prove how fucked up the thinking of some folks is. Fortunately, those nutjobs are a minority of Christians.