If I were God, I'd squash this man like a bug.

[GingerV]

Oh thanks so much, Mat....I'm very flattered. But I'm afraid I'm a Yank living on the wrong side of the pond . Still, I'm choosing to take being mistaken for a virtual Brit as a compliment. If nothing else, it's nice to know there are people posting in prime GMT hours.

As far as believing in baptisms by fire, yup. Fraid so. But, as I've just learned, I can't both believe in them and know them. So as soon as I've had my first one, I guess I won't believe in them any more. Hang on, that doesn't make sense....oh hell, I'll just pull on my asbestos undies and wait .

Is this the part where I appologise for being in a terribly random mood today?

 

[matriarch]

Oh thanks so much, Mat....I'm very flattered. But I'm afraid I'm a Yank living on the wrong side of the pond . Still, I'm choosing to take being mistaken for a virtual Brit as a compliment. If nothing else, it's nice to know there are people posting in prime GMT hours.

As far as believing in baptisms by fire, yup. Fraid so. But, as I've just learned, I can't both believe in them and know them. So as soon as I've had my first one, I guess I won't believe in them any more. Hang on, that doesn't make sense....oh hell, I'll just pull on my asbestos undies and wait .

Is this the part where I appologise for being in a terribly random mood today?

Apologise for being random? Good heavens, no. Its de rigeur around here.

And as for being a Yank, that's ok, you're in Britland, so welcome honorary Brit.

Mat

 

[rgraham666]

The problem with religion is the one that effects every other human social construct; power and belief.

When first formed, all religions, as far as I know, are created to help make the world that human beings inhabit a better one. They help explain the way the world works and they set out guidelines on how we should act towards one another.

This requires that some members of the religion be put in positions of responsibility with the power to enforce the guidelines of the religion.

Almost immediately this power becomes the raison d'etre of the people with the power. They then become more concerned with getting and keeping power than doing good.

Belief contributes to this corruption by anchoring the religion's adherents to firmly to it's world view. Any doubt about the efficacy of the belief throws doubt on the entire system. Of course, since the world view is absolutely correct at all times in regard to everything, such doubt must be extirpated. Along with the people who bought up this doubt.

This is not a phenomena restricted to religion, of course.

 

[The Mutt]

Do I know for a fact that there is no God? No, and neither does anyone else. But that doesn't seem to stop them from telling us His every thought. They preach about love and peace, but the essence of Bush's religion is "I'm right, you are wrong, so you can burn in Hell." But who can expect logic from a religion that says eternal damnation awaits all who doubt God's infinite mercy? (Thanks Bill Hicks)

I just heard an emergency worker in Florida say that it was by the grace of God that there was no storm surge or thousands more would have died. So, I guess God wanted to kill just enough people to prove His Almighty-ness, but not so many as to piss us off. What a swell guy.

For more of my thoughts on the subject, please read my poems Psalm of Reason, Inhumanity and s'nataS tennoS.

The root of religion is ignorance.
Its tree is hatred.
The fruit of that tree is death.

 

[cloudy]

The root of religion is ignorance.
Its tree is hatred.
The fruit of that tree is death.

I'm sorry, I don't agree with this at all. If you choose to not practice any religion, that's your choice, but don't lump all religions together with a statement like that.

 

[The Mutt]

I'm sorry, I don't agree with this at all. If you choose to not practice any religion, that's your choice, but don't lump all religions together with a statement like that.

You are right, Cloudy. Being stuck in the middle of the Bible Belt as I am, I tend to have my ideas about religion shaped by the Falwells and Robertsons and their ilk. My apologies to all religions that have never started wars, destroyed civilizations, tortured non-believers, built gleaming cathedrals in the middle of poverty-ravaged ghettos, sanctioned pedophilia, terrorized children with tales of an all seeing eye that would send you to eternal torture if you screwed up, labelled people abominations because they love the wrong person, asked for a poor man's last dollar in donation, told people to substitute prayer for medicine and justified it all with the BIG LIE of loving the sinner but hating the sin.

Seriously, Cloudy, I know there are religions that practice love and tolerance, not just preach it. There's just damned few around these parts.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Whenever religion comes up here, we get into a bunch of arguments that arise from our different conceptions of what religion is. To some of us, religion means that impulse that makes us search for meaning in the universe; to others, religion means a political institution that blinds people with dogma and rules their life with fear. These are hardly the same thing.

I take the former view of religion, and I therefore take Amicus’ faith in reason as being just as religious as the fundamentalist’s belief in God or the atheist’s belief in materialism. Some of these beliefs are Deist, some are not, but they’re all taken on faith and influence the way one lives and understands one’s life.

Personally, I’m an atheist and have been since I first learned the word, but I’m a religious atheist in that I’m very aware of the questions religion poses and the need we all have for answers, and the older I get, the more sensitive I am to to feelings and things in our lives that transcend the purely material. I’m aware of divinity, although I might not know what to make of it.

I also believe that when you start talking about religion, you have to separate the spiritual teachings from the ethical ones from the methods that organized religion uses to maintain political control of its adherents.

When we talk about ‘Christianity’ or ‘Islam’ or ‘Zoroastrianism’ or whatever, it might help if we specified whether we’re talking about the political institution or the essential spiritual teaching or the kind of simplistic Old Man In The Sky stuff they hammer into your heads in Sunday school.

---dr.M.

 

[Guest]

You seem like a bright guy, amicus. I really hope this goes somewhere.

And what a sweet gentleman you are, Joe Wordsworth.

I hope you weren't too disappointed when you realized attempting a discussion with amicus was pointless.

 

[The Mutt]

Whenever religion comes up here, we get into a bunch of arguments that arise from our different conceptions of what religion is. To some of us, religion means that impulse that makes us search for meaning in the universe; to others, religion means a political institution that blinds people with dogma and rules their life with fear. These are hardly the same thing.

I take the former view of religion, and I therefore take Amicus’ faith in reason as being just as religious as the fundamentalist’s belief in God or the atheist’s belief in materialism. Some of these beliefs are Deist, some are not, but they’re all taken on faith and influence the way one lives and understands one’s life.

Personally, I’m an atheist and have been since I first learned the word, but I’m a religious atheist in that I’m very aware of the questions religion poses and the need we all have for answers, and the older I get, the more sensitive I am to to feelings and things in our lives that transcend the purely material. I’m aware of divinity, although I might not know what to make of it.

I also believe that when you start talking about religion, you have to separate the spiritual teachings from the ethical ones from the methods that organized religion uses to maintain political control of its adherents.

When we talk about ‘Christianity’ or ‘Islam’ or ‘Zoroastrianism’ or whatever, it might help if we specified whether we’re talking about the political institution or the essential spiritual teaching or the kind of simplistic Old Man In The Sky stuff they hammer into your heads in Sunday school.

---dr.M.

When I say "religion" I am refering to the political institutions. The other things you descibe, I refer to as "thinking about things."
Which, when you think about it, is the opposite of religion.

 

[cloudy]

You are right, Cloudy. Being stuck in the middle of the Bible Belt as I am, I tend to have my ideas about religion shaped by the Falwells and Robertsons and their ilk. My apologies to all religions that have never started wars, destroyed civilizations, tortured non-believers, built gleaming cathedrals in the middle of poverty-ravaged ghettos, sanctioned pedophilia, terrorized children with tales of an all seeing eye that would send you to eternal torture if you screwed up, labelled people abominations because they love the wrong person, asked for a poor man's last dollar in donation, told people to substitute prayer for medicine and justified it all with the BIG LIE of loving the sinner but hating the sin.

Seriously, Cloudy, I know there are religions that practice love and tolerance, not just preach it. There's just damned few around these parts.

I live smack in the middle of the bible belt, too, so I know exactly what you mean. A bunch of hypocrites that go to church every time the doors are open and think that excuses their behavior the rest of the time because they're a "good Christian."

And, for the record, I'm not Christian.

 

[ABSTRUSE]

If I were God, I would take up Flamenco dancing and squash a whole lot of people.

 

[shereads]

Amicus/Joe: I don't think religion is the root cause of war, but rather a tool used by politicians to incite people to war and keep them motivated when the body bags start arriving home in large numbers. During the Cold War, our leaders didn't need religion for that purpose. We had Kruschev pounding his shoe on the table and promising to bury us.

Sure, it was nice to have God on our side against godless Communism, but there were scarier things about the Kremlin than its godlessness.

The Crusades, on the other hand, must have required some serious salesmanship of the "doing God's will" variety that our boy Dubya fell back on when his other reasons for war in Iraq lost credibility. There can't have been huge numbers of Europeans who lived in fear that Islamic heathens would come and destroy them. Yet somehow, they needed to be motivated to assist in a bloody power grab. If Islam wasn't their enemy, at least it could be painted as God's enemy.

As I've said before, I'm not an atheist because I know there are things I can't know. I think Amicus sees agnosticism as the failure to take a stand; I see it as the recognition that there is more to the universe than I can know.

One of the dictionary definitions of faith is "firm belief in something for which there is no proof." Since atheists can't prove that there is no god, atheism requires no less faith than Christianity or Islam.

I sometimes envy people of faith; I've seen them take comfort in it where there was no logical reason to keep going - after the suicide of a child, for example.

But there remains a darker side to the same faith: the belief that suicide is a sin for which there can be no redemption. At the funeral of a suicide, the belief of damnation hung in the air like a cloud of misery, unspoken. It became necessary for the faithful to ignore a component of what they had been taught, and for the priest who performed the service to help them do it. Faith was flexible that day. When it isn't, it can be horribly cruel - It hasn't been more than a couple of centuries ago that the families of suicides faced social scorn and could even be stripped of their property and titles.

Anyone interested in what absolute faith can do when it's used to rationalize the unthinkable, is invited to read Jon Krakauer's "Under the Banner of Heaven." (Krakauer is best known for "Into Thin Air.") "Banner" is the true account of a brutal double murder that was, according to the killers, carried out on direct orders from God. Krakauer's jailhouse interview with the surviving killer is terrifying. "Unrepentant" doesn't apply here. This man is calm, smiling, absolutely at peace in his belief that he alone understood God's will and had the courage to carry it out, by torturing and killing his sister-in-law and stabbing her child to death.

The interview took place a few months after 9/11, and Krakauer asked the killer to explain how his own faith was different from Osama Bin Laden's. Rather than answering with some knee-jerk denial, he describes the killer's response as a long period of silent contemplation, as if he hadn't considered the parallel before. His answer reveals that his faith remains unshaken: "I can see how you might think he {Bin Laden} and I are alike; we both serve God. The difference is, he serves a false God. I serve the one true God."

 

[Svenskaflicka]

I'm thinking about the psycho guy in Kids In The Hall, who looked at people from a distance and pretended to crush their heads between his thumb and index finger. "I'm crrrrushing your head! I'm crrrrushing your head! Crrrush! Crrrrussh!"

 

[shereads]

The problem with religion is the one that effects every other human social construct; power and belief.

When first formed, all religions, as far as I know, are created to help make the world that human beings inhabit a better one. They help explain the way the world works and they set out guidelines on how we should act towards one another.

This requires that some members of the religion be put in positions of responsibility with the power to enforce the guidelines of the religion.

Almost immediately this power becomes the raison d'etre of the people with the power. They then become more concerned with getting and keeping power than doing good.

Belief contributes to this corruption by anchoring the religion's adherents to firmly to it's world view. Any doubt about the efficacy of the belief throws doubt on the entire system. Of course, since the world view is absolutely correct at all times in regard to everything, such doubt must be extirpated. Along with the people who bought up this doubt.

This is not a phenomena restricted to religion, of course.

"Why can't women go to the stoning?"

"Because it's written, that's why."

~ Monty Python's The Life of Brian

 

[minsue]

I'm thinking about the psycho guy in Kids In The Hall, who looked at people from a distance and pretended to crush their heads between his thumb and index finger. "I'm crrrrushing your head! I'm crrrrushing your head! Crrrush! Crrrrussh!"

Ah, I do so miss that.

 

[shereads]

Whenever religion comes up here, we get into a bunch of arguments that arise from our different conceptions of what religion is. To some of us, religion means that impulse that makes us search for meaning in the universe; to others, religion means a political institution that blinds people with dogma and rules their life with fear. These are hardly the same thing.

I take the former view of religion, and I therefore take Amicus’ faith in reason as being just as religious as the fundamentalist’s belief in God or the atheist’s belief in materialism. Some of these beliefs are Deist, some are not, but they’re all taken on faith and influence the way one lives and understands one’s life.

Personally, I’m an atheist and have been since I first learned the word, but I’m a religious atheist in that I’m very aware of the questions religion poses and the need we all have for answers, and the older I get, the more sensitive I am to to feelings and things in our lives that transcend the purely material. I’m aware of divinity, although I might not know what to make of it.

I also believe that when you start talking about religion, you have to separate the spiritual teachings from the ethical ones from the methods that organized religion uses to maintain political control of its adherents.

When we talk about ‘Christianity’ or ‘Islam’ or ‘Zoroastrianism’ or whatever, it might help if we specified whether we’re talking about the political institution or the essential spiritual teaching or the kind of simplistic Old Man In The Sky stuff they hammer into your heads in Sunday school.

---dr.M.

Good point, Doctor. When I think about religion, I think of the institutions of rules/rewards/mandated worship and of the people who use those insitutions to control others and justify themselves.

Arriving to live in the Bible Belt during pre-adolesence was like being dropped into a pool of ice-cold water that other kids seemed to think was normal. I couldn't help but listen with skepticsm, and was struck by the way God was always credited with sparing someone from a disease, or saving a child from a car accident - and implicitly blamed for allowing others to die. It didn't make sense that a creator of all things should be so petty and random, and yet praised for being merciful.

It took a long time to accept that spirituality doesn't require religion - or rather, the structure and rationale that I think of as religion.

Rejecting the idea of God as a person with superpowers isn't the same as rejecting spiritual exploration. On the contrary, it's where it began for me. When I stopped feeling shackled to the Biblical God with his tests and jealousy and contradictions, I started looking for other ways to explain the almost universal presence of empathy and conscience; and to explain the seemingly inconsequential moments of psychic connection that so many of us have experienced in times of crisis, as when a loved one was in trouble. I've begun to think we're all fragments of "god;" scattered pieces of something greater, the something that can't be charted and analyzed and divided into its components.

For those who find spiritual growth in an organized religion, I'm happy, provided they do so without imposing their rules on society and calling them God's rules. My church didn't help bring me closer to God, it just made me feel contempt for how small he seemed. Statements like the one that inspired this thread remind me of everything I despised about those years.

My church diminished God to the level of a jealous, territorial male entity who always has something to prove; no wonder people like Jeb and Dubya embrace him so wholeheartedly; it means they can live up to the godly ideal without trying very hard. Just kicking some heathen ass may is sometimes all it takes.

 

[The Mutt]

Here is what really disturbs me: George W. Bush is a self-proclaimed born again evangelical christian. Acording to the tenets of his religion, anyone who is not will suffer eternal torture when they die. Gandhi, Mother Theresa, me.
Now remember all those times he said that he feels bad for the innocent Iraqi children who might get killed in his war? They are all burning in hell, too. What a swell guy.
He also believes that Jesus ain't coming back until some temple gets rebuilt in Jerusalem. So, no matter how insane the leaders of Israel may go, he will support them 100%.
Our foreign policy is being set by a man who believes in fairy tales.
He also believes that every word in the Bible is the literal truth. The world is six thousand years old, two of every species can fit on one boat and the sun stood still in the sky.
Our medical and scientific policy is being set by a man who doesn't believe in evolution and believes that the world is flat.
And don't forget that anybody who sucks a dick must be put to death.
A vote for Bush is a vote to return to the Dark Ages.

 

[Guest]

And don't forget that anybody who sucks a dick must be put to death.

I'm in big trouble.

 

[cloudy]

I'm in big trouble.

and don't forget all the butt sex.

 

[The Mutt]

And we will all go down together.....

That Jon Stewart butt sex quote absolutely destroys me.

 

[Guest]

and don't forget all the butt sex.

I'm well and truly screwed, aren't I?

 

[cloudy]

I'm well and truly screwed, aren't I?

Me too, darlin' - me too.

 

[Belegon]

I'm well and truly screwed, aren't I?

if not, you should be. I would certainly be willing...

 

[GratefulFred]

Only way to treat a God...

...is to out witt him/her. In my rock opera I do just that.

Naturally this post is meaningless to those who haven't read the story but suffice to say if you did read it, you'd see who gets the last laugh.

P.S. Don't let me be a thread killer for your religion discussion. I'm a born again Athiest in case none of you are asking.

You may now move about the cabin.

 

[Guest]

And we will all go down together.....

That Jon Stewart butt sex quote absolutely destroys me.

You know, my favorite quote lately from Jon Stewart is about Robert Novak. Last week he was discussing Novak's recent column defending the Swiftboat ads that are attacking Kerry (and also mentioned Novak's help in outing CIA operatives) . . .

Anyway, Stewart said, "Congratulations, Robert Novak. You truly are a douchbag of liberty!"

I almost fell out of my chair.