Then a few months ago I wrote a column in which I expressed disgust at those militant atheists who had turned into haters of religion. I also wrote that it was about time that religious people stopped wasting their energy on those who were never going to acknowledge any good that might come out of their faith.

A short time after that I wrote about some examples of great, modern Christian heroes — the kind of people who exemplify what faith is really about. That too met with a great deal of derision by many readers who concluded that those profiled were so rare as to be meaningless. And despite the fact that the people I profiled had left testimony that affirmed faith played a major role in their heroism, many readers dismissed that idea as a lie or a delusion.

I am well aware of how these negative conclusions are reached by many people. In the course of any day, there are always stories in the news that speak about religious violence, intolerance, judgment and greed. The abuse scandal in the Catholic Church is the prime example, of course. The scandals surrounding mega-churches in the United States is another. Even stories about the attack on the Coptic Christians in Egypt earlier this month came with a subtext: religious people killing other religious people and making the world worse for everyone else.

But the same over-arching judgments about religion can be applied to nearly every sphere of life — but they rarely are. Religious institutions are human institutions, even if they are meant to be a window into the divine. Those who do the most wrong get most of the attention while those who do the most good are ignored.

Think about individual nations for a moment. How many people entirely reject the United States because of its history of slavery or occasional misadventure in foreign lands? How many people utterly reject Germany today because it was there Nazism exploded into its awful glory? Do we hate the people of Zimbabwe because a madman rules them?

In the same way, is every corporation inherently corrupt because some have been corrupt?

Most people are aware of the human-rights abuses of communist China. Yet I am not sure how many people would suggest no longer buying Chinese-made goods or would have protested our participation in the Beijing Olympics.

The point here is that only the oblivious would refuse to acknowledge the harm done by religion, but only the narrow minded and the bigoted would then conclude that all religion is evil.

I recently found a story by author Roger Scruton written in November 2010. In it he asks whether religion can be a force for good.

I think his words that follow sum up what many others and I have tried to articulate, though perhaps not as well:

“Now I don’t deny that there are wrong ways of pursuing this religious quest. Those for whom faith is a call to arms and religion a blanket justification for violence against the unbeliever, are a threat to all of us. But although they make the most noise, they are not the most numerous among religious people. For most people religion is what it has always been — a cultivation of piety, a humility in the face of creation and an attempt to live according to a shared moral code. Piety, humility and morality are all things that we are losing. I would suggest that we would do better to keep them and to study how they might be directed to the right objects and in the right way.”