Regarding Religion: Still More and More Thoughts.

*Christian theist: God is the answer!

Sceptic: So how do you KNOW that God is the answer instead of (fill in the blank)? The answer is you don't KNOW and you can't KNOW! If you don't KNOW the answer, then your answer should be "I don't know", not "God". Further to that, just because you don't KNOW the answer (if you stop to admit that to yourself) doesn't mean that God is the answer by default. For example, I don't know why archaeologists and historians can't find any trace of The Exodus. Therefore God must have erased or covered up all of the evidence. Why? Because God works in mysterious ways, that's why! Not a very satisfactory explanation now, is it.

*Religion is an illusion rooted in wishful thinking or in wish fulfillment; our need or desire to confront our inner fears and insecurities - paraphrasing from Sigmund Freud: "The Future of An Illusion" (1927). Spot on! People desperately cling on to their various religious faiths, against all rationality because they are terrified of the brutality and hopelessness of daily life and the finality of death. As one saying goes, "life's a bitch and then you die". As philosopher Thomas Hobbes expressed it, life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. So people search for some sort of personal security, meaning and purposefulness in an indifferent, cold, uncaring and purposeless cosmos. If no one really cares about you (and everybody has got their own set of personal issues and problems to deal with) then you clutch at the straw that is that invisible magic man in the sky. You want a Big Brother to make everything come out all right just the way your parents did when you were a child when they sheltered and looked after you and kissed away the hurt and the tears when you cried in their lap and always comforted you.

*If you have to lie in order to promote your religion, then your religion is utter crap!

*You have to wonder how much of their religion Christians ACTUALLY believe vis-a-vis are they just going through the motions; going along with the crowd in order to be accepted by family, friends and their society; in order to fit in with the majority.

*Religion first gives you the disease (the original sinning stick) then gives you the cure - the afterlife carrot.

*You don't need a god to have meaning and purpose in your life.

*There is one trait that the multi-thousands of differing religious belief systems / theologies have exhibited and that is the power of the human imagination to boldly go and imagine imaginary concepts never imagined before. The world would be a less colorful and interesting place without our various mythologies.

*I think there should be mandatory religious and Biblical education in schools since that should ensure a steady stream of atheists growing up and entering the community!

*Religions often do good so as to mask the evil they do, but can now do with impunity.

*The Catholic Church: AIDS is bad but the use of condoms is worse since God does not approve of 'birth control' for any reason. It is apparently taught in Africa by Catholics that using condoms makes "Baby Jesus cry". Weird.

*Then too we had the Catholic Church's Index of Prohibited Books. It wasn't just the Nazis that burned books. Now you've got to be really insecure and unsure of your theology and how to defend it if you have to hide behind a lowered curtain that results by the censoring of divergent opinions. It's just another nail in Christianity's coffin.

*There's no more evidence for unformal and disorganized religious belief (like being spiritual without being a member of any formal religious cult / organization / church) than formally organized religion. It's all just a form of "woo".

*When it comes to religion, "live and let live" True Believers are very much in the minority. (Via Greta Christina).

*Any religion is just a working hypothesis about how life, the Universe and everything, but especially the world, works. As such, that religion is subject to scrutiny and rebuttal and being challenged and corrected as would any other working hypothesis from any other topical area or of subject matter of concern to humans, from the sciences through to political systems.

*We don't tend to go shopping for the brand of religion we want among all of the different and widely differing brands of religion on offer and then picking the most suitable the way we do for the multi brands of packets of biscuits on offer at the supermarket or for a specific brand or fashion label of dress at the ladies fashion shop and clothing department. Instead we keep eating / wearing the same brand again and again and again because that was just the way we were raised. Likewise, we tend to keep the religion that was shoved down our throats when we were kids. This is in part due to tradition (if it was good enough for Mum & Dad its good enough for me) as well as family / social pressure. Of course in some societies the pressure borders on actual physical threats and punishments if you stray from the accepted fold.

*Thanks to Christianity and its all-loving, all-just, all-merciful God, over 50,000 innocent people were tortured and executed - they were called "witches" but were no more actual witches than those who turned the thumb-screws, tightened the rack, and lite the bonfires surrounding the stake. By the way, this practice is still going on in many remote areas in underdeveloped countries. God (and His servants here on earth) should hang their heads in shame for Exodus 22: 18 "Thou shall not suffer a witch to live".

*If you are religious but if you were not indoctrinated (i.e. - brainwashed) starting as a young child into your current religious belief system, then tell me with a straight face that you, as a mature adult, without any prior religious convictions, and without any external peer pressures, went shopping for your personally most appealing brand of theology, and having found same, adopted it. And assuming you did the above, how do you now know that you picked the right one - assuming that there is in fact a right one out of the hundreds of variations on monotheism alone on tap?

*Having in argument with a Christian is like playing chess with a pigeon. No matter how good at chess you are the pigeon will just shit over the board and strut around like they've won. [I read this somewhere but exact source unknown.]

*The massive diversity of religious faiths is a major argument against religious faith.

*Religions of necessity creates an “us-and-them” mentality.

*Christians are in favor of freedom of religion as long as it’s their religion.

*If you ever want to know what is wrong with your religion, just ask somebody from an alternative religion. They’ll be very pleased to tell you.

*Teach a child one religion and you indoctrinate them. Teach them many religions and you inoculate them.

*The Bible just HAS to be true. God just HAS to exist and so does Jesus. How could so many people be so wrong for so long? Yet how could so many people be so wrong for so long about belief in other religions and deities? People get things wrong. Deal with it.

*How insecure are you about your religion if you get up in arms over other people refusing to say "Merry Christmas"? Like think about it. How much of a weak pathetic person you make yourself out to be when you get offended by something that stupid. (via Ana Kasparian - "The Young Turks" )

*Regarding Women: Ephesians 5: 22-23 22 ("Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body." and 1 Timothy 2: 11-12 ("Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.). Now relate all of that to your mother, grandmother, sister, girlfriend, wife, or other female friend. Then run like hell.

*How is it that different religions can use the same variety of arguments for the existence of a god, yet believe in different gods?

*With a plethora of gods on offer, how actually do you choose one as THE god? And having chosen that single deity, how do you prove your deity is THE deity; how do you prove all the other gods are false deities?

*The True Believer's position is that their position is the default position and anyone who doesn't accept their position has the entire burden to disprove their default position.

*Even if any single religion could prove that all other religions were false; that all other holy books were fictional; and that all other gods were nonexistent, that still doesn't make their religion true.

*Religions arose when the great unwashed held beliefs in omens and taboos, ghosts and goblins, magic and wizards, astrology and an earth-centered cosmos, here-be-dragons (and unicorns) and all things weird and maybe not-so-wonderful were prevalent. Somehow this is not surprising. The question arises, if religion had never to date existed, could it arise from scratch in this, the 21st Century?

*One reason religion has survived into modern times is that it tells the great unwashed in a one-size-fits-all fashion what to think and what to do and when to do it, thus saving the populace from having to think and act by themselves and for themselves.

*The authority of Scripture rests on the authority of the Church and the authority of the Church rests on the authority of Scripture. The argument is coherent but it is also circular and thus proves nothing.