Well, if you want to prick people's sensibilities, start with one of the two most inflammatory subjects you can find, religion and politics. I can't help myself, I have to be a firebrand.
Personally, I find organized religion to be a bore. Don't get me wrong, I used to believe in a much higher power than myself, I just don't see what difference it makes if you believe in the peripherals of a religion as opposed to the core values. Who cares if Mary was a virgin? Does it make a difference if Mohammed wanted women to cover their faces or not? Probably not. The core values of religions around the world are about ninety-eight percent the same. Be good to Mom and Dad, don't kill, don't steal, don't lie. Be kind to the less fortunate. Wash yourself, you might stink, and that makes it hard for others to get to know you. Thank whatever higher power for what he/she/it gave you. Really, be thankful, because a lot of things really are out of your hands when it comes to chance. Try to walk in someone else's shoes before you assume you have the right to criticize them. Try every day to make yourself better so the rest of us can work with you to build a better world.
I have a co-worker who is very religious and he tries to explain ( to his exhaustion and dismay) how God cannot possibly ever have been/done wrong, the Bible is the literal word of God and the Devil is on our heels every day, poking us with the pitchfork if sin and temptation. It's not nice to laugh at him, so I don't, but I do enjoy pointing out my concerns for his narrow view of spirituality. Personally, I don't believe in Hell. My concern is that any god who so lovingly allowed the universe to come into being and would then throw his/her/its most wonderful creations to roast everlastingly is quite a tempermental and capricious god, therefore not deserving of my praise. I would hope a god would be above behavior that even human children are chastised against.
What galls me the most about organized religion is the force that it exerts on large groups of people. Catholics/Christians fought with the Muslims to gain control of the Holy Lands back in the days of the Crusades. Muslims have been pissed at them ever since. Why? Because the Christians thought that there was a necessity to protect the land and the vestiges of holy relics and locales from another, foreign religion. For what? Is a church, a cathedral, a shrine the vessel of faith? Nope. They are places, things, ideas, not the repositories of the intangible faith that makes up a religion. Hey, I'm not saying that the Muslims were any better. They broke the rule that says not to take/abuse/destroy someone else's stuff. Not nice, not necessary. Kindergarteners are taught better behavior.
Moving on to the present: What the heck is the deal with creationists? Whether or not a god created the heaven and earth in six days and took a nap on the seventh, OR put a wildly perfect, self-evolving, self-organizing system in place, fully loaded with the software to adapt and change in an endless dance of variation is a matter of semantics. The people of biblical times would have laughed heartily if someone tried to explain deoxyribonucleic acid to them. Little tiny chains of invisible matter that are the code to each and every living thing on the planet. Hah! Sounds funny now that I say it! But we, that is, modern humans in this age of computers, scanning tunneling electron microscopes, atom-smashers and geosynchronous space-telescopes are more aware of the internal workings of nature. Does being aware of the process make it any less wonderful? No way, it makes it more interesting! Does a god want ignorant (not the same as stupid, mind you) followers or does it want them informed and frankly, awed, by its creations? Who knows? Last I checked, it stopped talking aloud near the end of the New Testament, through Jesus. But other religions I'm not aware of may have spoken to him more recently....
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