All religion is evil and I hate it.

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...Amen.

I wouldn't go quite that far myself. I strongly dislike a lot of aspects of religion but I don't think it's all bad.

The world would be a much better place without religion in my opinion. Some liberal religious communities can be positive for some people, but in the grand scheme of things, religion causes far more harm than otherwise.

I am not an atheist; I just hate religion.

I'm not religious, I think you call it a free spirit when I do believe in God & spirits, I REALLY BELIEVE that I can feel my mom's spirit & I can see her too, I can't feel her alot. Can spirit help you like fixing something for you or moving something? I also believe that you don't need to go to church to beleive in God, God is always with you.
I have so much trouble with religion. When my mom died 10 years ago, I went grocery shopping in the store, when I was finish, I sat on the bench outside the store, I end up crying, one or two women came up to me, they said ALOT of religious talk to me, I didnot understand.

Can understand the sentiment inthe Title of this thread .

I should clarify this statement.

My faith is in the Creator God, the Holy Spirit, and the Messiah/Savior.

My 'religion' (if you want to call it that) is based on the Sermon On The Mount (Matthew 5:1-7:29), which I can only TRY to express through my actions (but mostly fail).

But am I 'Saved'?  I like to think so.

Many well-meaning people have tried to explain their versions of Christianity to me, but their descriptions seem mostly directed toward convincing me to conform to their way of thinking -- which is almost always in conflict with the Bible in some way -- and which almost always seems directed toward "guilt-tripping" me into giving up my money, property, and time to serve their church's leadership.

So maybe when I say, "I hate religion", what I am really trying to say is that I hate being manipulated by 'religious' people into believing I am worthless, doomed to eternal damnation, and recoverable only by giving my money away to an organization that uses it to build monuments to itself instead of using it to help the poor out of poverty.

And maybe I am really saying that I hate the hypocrisy of organized religion -- "Do as you are told, not as you are shown."

Considering i spent most of my adult file in the Lutheran Church as a vocal soloist, I’ve been treated well, for the most part, considering the religious tradition I came from, which was anabaptist, evangelical, and fundamentalist. There was really not much love on the home front, with dad being an undiagnosed narcissist, mom being bipolar, both being from broken homes, and yours truly being the scapegoat.

Knowing about the Soviet experiment of eradicating religion and how it went - no, removing religion from the equation doesn't help with human nature. People don't become any more rational nor any less corrupt when you take religion away from them.

Actually, Albania was the only Eastern Bloc nation to officially ban religion.

My main criticism of religion is its infiltration into politics, through groups like the Family Research Council, Alliance Defending Freedom and Moms for Liberty.

I am glad you have clarified your beliefs here, Fnord.

I was becoming confused with the fact that in some posts you seem to value the bible/faith and in other posts you rant about organised religion.

These two seemingly contradictory opinions aren't actually contradictory, now that you have explained your beliefs in more detail.

Here in the U.S.A. at least, religion seems to be the most effective way of creating a sense of community within a group of people. This has had both good and bad consequences.

One of the things a sense of community can enable is political activism to defend the perceived interests of one's community. During the past 40 to 50 years, said political activism has been mostly bad IMO: the religious right wing. On the other hand, back in the 1950's and 1960's, various Black churches enabled a very well-organized Black civil rights movement to come into being.

It was something forged under survival pressure. When I see the middle east for example and how that was something of a hotbed for the transition from local pagan beliefs to monotheism it looks a lot like watching warriors on different islands in the Philippines fighting each other over land to such a degree that they sort of naturally-selected one of the most effective martial arts systems (kali) and I think in the south and east Mediterranean you had something similar happening with all of the tribes conquering whoever they could (old testament is loaded with that melee) and accordingly social cohesion was everything - hence the constant warfare, with whoever lost being enslaved or wiped out, selected for the belief systems with the strongest social cohesion which did the best job of holding social contract in escrow via the priesthood.

Things have obviously changed a lot for Christianity after the reformation and counterreformation but at a certain point (I had the chance to read Ioan Culiano's 'Eros and Magic in the Renaissance' and he unpacked this more), and it seems like it was heightened by the 18th European Enlightenment, certain protestant strains of Christianity became extremely literalist and started doing the thing we'd jokingly refer to as assuming that English translations of the bible from Latin from Greek were written by an 18th, 19th, or 20th century English speaking man or woman with a time machine and there was this endeavor made to completely break the import of the bible from regional history and act as if all of physical reality unfolded from what's really a catalog of regional beliefs from the time which grew into the beliefs and cultural code of a given people. The new testament is where things go really strange - and part of why it's hard to talk about is because the Platonism / Neoplatonism divide is 5th century BC vs. 4th or 5th century AD, lets just say there were ideas that had most of the content of Neoplatonism but they weren't Plotinus or Proclus, but the New Testament is filled with it and it seems to have little or no relation to the old testament.

I personally don't have any problem with people being religious if it helps them be better people. To some sad degree I also worry at times that we even need some amount of fundamentalists if the, I'll call them 'practical atheists', start thinking human life has no value and we should be able to do whatever we want to it. At the same time, over all, it's best that fundamentalists aren't writing religion into law other than perhaps asking which beliefs about things like human dignity show up as having severe consequences in other ways in the world, ie. the Chesterton's fence stuff which was wise - not necessarily religious in origin - but got rolled into religious texts because any important knowledge typically tended to be.

It's like that in the USA. For some reason the church largely keeps its nose out of politics in the UK, and vice versa. Exceptions include 26 Anglican bishops in the House Of Lords, and the occasional pulpit rant about the government's disregard for the rights of immigrants and the poor. There was also a very high-up police chief who said that AIDS was God punishing the gay community. At the time he was roundly criticised for his hateful words, but it didn't stop the gov giving the nutjob a knighthood later on.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/g ... 73339.html

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25889828

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At Core Religion Is the Ideologies and Symbols That Bond and Bind the Social
Animal Humans Together; to Both Work And Play Together; to Both Survive and Yes Thrive;

At Best A Religion Does This Giving, Sharing, Caring, Healing, With Most Respect and Least Harm;

At Worst A Religion

Harms, Rapes, Maims,

Kills, And Flogs The Naked

Bodies of Women in the Streets

While Men Who Have Lost Any Semblance

of Humankind Jeer on the Nightmares Humans

Are Capable of Bringing to Fruition in the Name
Of A Smallest Truly Evil God Called God; in Other

Words, The Name God is Almost Worthless in Terms

Of Humanity if it Does Not Truly Bring LoVE iN Peace,

What Has Brought Humans This Far, Still Alive Together Now Most.

Humans Living in Desert Scarcity, Where Even Water is Not Naturally Abundant

Will Surely Become Dangerous and Tribal in Nature to Obtain Resources Necessary to Just Survive;

Ah Yes The Birth

of Desert Tribal Gods;

Ah Yes Where These Made-up

God's Justify The Harming, Raping,

Maiming, And Killing of the Most Vulnerable

Among Us Desecrating Their Humanity Even After Death;

Most Religion Originating from Human Scarcity is Guilty of This;

Of Course The Fiction They Create Has No Responsibility Unto Itself;

And This is Where Human Abstract Constructs Get Us Into Trouble as the

Stories Both Good

And Evil Gain an

Existence in Our Lives

That Many Humans cannot
Discern As Real Versus Fiction;

Not Much Different Than Children

Believing in Santa Claus or the Current Orange Grinch;

Yet Never the Less, the Placebo Effect is Beneficial to Those Who
Gain Well Being Rewards from the Power of Positive Suggestion; It is

No Secret, Science Proves it Works Not Unlike the Harmful Nocebo Effect

of Believing In Negative Stories like the Sticks of Hell After Death Versus the

Carrots

of Heaven

in A Dirt Nap;

Yet You See LoVE iN Peace

Is A Real State of Being to Share

Among Nations of People Who Get Along ThiS WaY;

And Yes As Long as You Fit in, You May Find The Real Healing

That LoVE iN Peace Brings in Communion of Human Beings even

in A Small Protestant Church in the Backwoods as i Have Surely Felt that Warmth

There as a Participant Anthropology Observer; And It's True As Long as You Have

A Voice of An 'Angel' Hehe, Not Literally of Course; And Have That 'Autistic Splinter-Skill' too;

You Will Surely Fit in

Any Church; And

Be Begged to Join the

Choir Up Front Most Every

Sunday You Lead the Choir From

the Back Pews Generating the Real Spirit of LoVE iN Peace

In Communion With the Voice of LoVE iN Peace in Song and Yes Free Dance too...

Yet You See, i'm Not Waiting For A Statue at the Bottom of the Ocean to Come back to life.

LoVE iN Peace

is Real; 'Here i Am'

And i Will Give it, Share it,
Care it, And HeaL iT, till my Last Warm

Breath, MaKinG This Life Worth Every Breath as Gift;

i Don't Need any Religion to Teach me That; It was All

Included in my

Mother's First

Hug and Smile;

Yet You See Not Everyone Has
A Gift of a Mother Like That; Not

Every Child Receives that Gift; So It's

True When That is Absent, A Story of

Unconditional LoVE iN Peace, if Only Part of A Fictional
Story About a Man in A Book Is Better Than God Damned Nothing

As the Great Band 'Styx' Once Wrote in a Song Named "Lords of the Ring"

in 1978,

"In the year of the Lords
The message came from above
The heavens opened with their mighty sound
that shook the people in the town
And so we came from everywhere
The young and old the rich and poor
To hear the legend of the magic ring
and of the powers it could bring, they sing
All hail to the Lords of the Ring
To the magic and mystery they bring
To the music in their story
All hail to the Lords of the Ring
To the magic and mystery it brings
May we someday wear its glory
And now the message is clear
For I became a Lord this year
And though the legend was pure fantasy
We still need the hope it brings, so let's sing
All hail to the Lords of the Ring
To believe is a wondrous thing
May we always sing their glory
All hail to the Lords of the Ring
To the magic and mystery they bring
To the promise of their story"

So 'Here i Am;' How About You With SMiLes...

Yep, my Wife Got Bored in Catholic Church
And iPhone Recorded me Singing As Usual,
A Day the Choir Director Went Missing; Effortless
in Wu Wei Ease, From the Back of the Church, hehe..



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-MXMO9euGU

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Last edited by aghogday on 10 Oct 2023, 10:38 am, edited 1 time in total.

Snd the Church writes about offenses to Gawd.....seems that giving this guy a knighthood would qualify!
Even go so far as calling it an obsenity...in the eyes of the Lord..... (:D maybe even in this house of Lords)lolz