ABOUT RELIGION

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Yet another sweeping statement I've encountered on this forum!
Take for example some homeless people who are starving. A group of Christians working at a homeless shelter are practising their religion in the form of charity - giving food to those in need. This is an organised public practice of religion - how can it be described as one of the misfortunes of our existence?

Good decent people do good decent things with or without religion.There are both very good and very bad people within and without the church. It's not the church that makes them that way.

1. It is possible to be generous without being religious. I donate blood (I am O+ CVT-) for selfish reasons. Someday I might need a transfusion and I want to encourage people to keep the pipeline filled. I don't give for God. I give for my own good.

2. You have overlooked the Crusades, Holy Wars and Jihads. You are not paying attention to reality.

ruveyn

I tried earlier to submit a post and it hasn't seemed to manifest itself into the forum. And I can't find it as I don't really have a harmonious relationship going on with computers. So anyhow I'll try this again -

Sand, I agree it's not the church that necessarily makes people do good things. But because there are instances where it does cause people to perform decent actions proves that the church can't be said to be a wholly (get it!) bad thing, source of all our misery.

ruveyn, I am not overlooking the fact that atrocities are performed in the name of religion and I would not go so far as to call it a wholly positive thing.

But I still think religion has a degree of positive purpose and creates positive outcomes in the world. Some people make better sense of a system of morals when it is fitted within the context of religion. They recieve comfort and meaning when faced with the cruelty and mystery of life and death and nothing beyond this life is known for certain. If nothing other than the purposes of expediency I think it has a positive place in the world.

I am with you that the world could possibly be simpler and less divisive without the various frameworks of religion. But if all religious people are not able to abide by the ethics taught to them in their own religions - if religion was taken away, do you think people would still abide by a form of secular ethics? Yes there is killing in the name of religion, but there is also killing in the name of other things as well. Do you really think it would make the world a better place without it?

It's an unfortunate thing that there are people who seem to have a predisposition for violence, control or any other forms of harm to others. As religion is so tightly interwoven in each of our cultures it is easy to mix up the two and blame the religious context for the peoples' predisposition for harmful actions.

One of the worst problems with religion is that it treats most people like gullible babies. Death is real. Everybody's going to die. There is no cloud cuckoo land full of people with wings and it's about time the human race grew into adulthood and accepted that the most precious thing about life is life itself and every minute of it is intensely valuable because when that's gone everything is gone. Then maybe people wouldn't go to wars and wouldn't feel so happy about killing other people.
When my son died a few people tried to butter it over with religious horse manure and that offended me deeply. My son was gone - entirely gone and it was very important I should feel the intense pain of that loss, a pain that never ends as it should not.

I'm so sorry Sand for your loss......................... Everyone's got their own ways of dealing with these things. Which is the very reason different beliefs/beliefs in no beliefs need to be accepted. To begrudge someone their coping mechanism, or degree of ability to deal without one would be unfair in terms of the tolerant world I thought we may have been striving for.

Pouring honey on excrement doesn't turn it into hot cross buns. I don't begrudge anybody their coping mechanisms as long as it doesn't screw up the world. I got the icy horrors when I was about 5 or 6 years old and realized that I was eventually going to die and living a long life has not made it any better. I watched both my mother and my father die of painful cancers, going starkly insane with the suffering when the doctors, because of the fear of federal laws, gave them insufficient painkillers. I watched my son die pleading for me to save him and I could not. Death is real, it total obliteration, and nobody ends up in heaven wagging their tails and singing inane songs. This must be accepted and realized and fought against by adults who are mature enough to accept it and hate it as it should be hated.

Tradition in many cultures accepts and tolerates things that must be extirpated from the world. I do not tolerate the way women are beaten and tortured and killed in many Middle Eastern cultures. I do not tolerate a culture that supports crooks and drug mongers in Afghanistan in order to get a fuel pipeline through the country nor when it packs the pockets of the gangsters at the head of the financial institutions while people are having difficulty finding enough to eat or remain in their homes. I do not tolerate a culture that accepts the Lord's Resistance Army that teaches little kids to kill each other with AK47s and rapes little girls and destroys educational institutions. Vicious cultures are poisoning the world and this world is very fragile and I am not happy that it turn into a global desert like Mars or a furnace like Venus because people are too stupid to look at reality straight in the face and try to turn it around. Death cannot be chocolate coated and the only real value that each of us has is the time we are alive.

I agree with some of what you say, but maintain my position on religion as stated previously. I think the point now comes to when it's appropriate to attempt to change others. IMO it is more than acceptable to attempt to change those things that are causing harm. But if something (for example, certain aspects of religion) is not actually causing harm (and as I've pointed out - might be providing benefit) then it is no one's place to force their opinion on others.

Toughest SAND:

Loss is impossible. Religion helps impressionable minds find strength and reason in times of personal loss.

Most posters on this forum don't seem to need this kind of reasoning to deal. I wonder if this doesn't have to do with the fundamentals all ready being built in ourselves.

Sand...
Must you deny Your Spirit? (The unexplained spark of life). The spirit In those You lost. They had built in good (selflessness) in their mix. Almost everyone is selfless in some ways.
If you dissect this spark of life you end up with a variety of possibilities for what this spark is. Energy to say the least. In the most base explanation for the spark of life you end up with ENERGY!! !.
What if you can not see energy but it really is there, That would be Reality my dear. So are those Adults who believe in ENERGY way out in left field. Is it then such a stretch to conclude that GOD IS ENERGY, and is in contact with our "sparks of life" in a way that is undetectable (if you have been blindly living in a world with only 5 senses).

IF YOU CAN"T WRAP YOUR MIND AROUND IT. THIS DOESN'T MEAN THAT THOSE WHO CAN SEE IT ARE WRONG or immature. (Although I am immature anyways, but what ever.)

Here's one way to detect YOUR GOD. Get into Your Mind (Deep) Peel Back every layer of everything that you understand to fill your reality, and set it aside (One piece at a time). You will be left with an infinite amalgam of apparent negative spaces. These are filled with something... OPEN YOUR MIND AND LISTEN TO YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS. Your Spirit is screaming at You. . . "Wake Up!! ! I'm Alive!! ! There are many things You need to see!! !"

Have you looked into Rudolph Steiner, This man digs deeply into spirituality without the limits of traditional spiritual contextualization.

There is another belief system "Religion/ science" that although a bit more out there: Quantum Physics. (This ones pretty neat)

...Have more than flesh in your future. (Flesh is pretty gross when you look at it too close.)

all hopes.

Hilarious (" You can poor honey on sh#t but you won't get hot crossed buns") ha ha

The most energetic thing in our localityis the Sun and it is in no sense alive. You are confused.

So then we will bow to your negativity.

The sun IS DEAD

I WILL ROT

AND OUR MEMORIES WILL DIE WITH OUR GENERATIONS PASSING

AND WHATS THE USE

much better, thank you for saving me. Sand

Cheer up

Let that big breathing sun melt the ice around your heart,

Aer you sure about how you feel about me?

And the road to good intentions is paved with hell.

How so?

Difficulties in life which cause maturity and character growth, do you mean?