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Originally Posted by shaw-n
How long will the simple despise wisdom????
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It does little good to insult those who think differently than you, and you can make no more claim to wisdom if you are going to describe the majority of the world as "simple."
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No. The state became the religion.
It has never been done on a mass level in our recorded history.
All religion is pejorative.
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I have no idea what you are talking about in the above, but the claims "the state became the religion," and "all religion is pejorative" seem too large. It's always dangerous to draw simplistic generalities from anything as complex as human belief systems.
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Religions are like training wheels, or crutches which help you out until you can make your own way.
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For some people, that may well be true. For many others, who have spent a great deal of time and thought on their beliefs, I doubt that they will be convinced.
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I see that they serve a function, but people tend to overuse them and become dependant on them psychologically.
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People can become dependent on practically anything which fills a need (or even a desire). That would include becoming dependent on the putdown, as a substitute for careful understanding of the other side, and careful argument of one's own.
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You can believe in God and not believe in religions. It is no contradiction.
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Quite so, one would think, and yet precisely backwards. I "believe in religions" because I see them there before me every day. There they are, the church of this and the mosque of that and the temple to whosis -- all with congregations numbering in the hundreds or thousands. Oh, yes, I believe in religions, because the evidence is in front of my eyes. I do not, however, believe in god, for whom (which?) there is no evidence that I am able to perceive. Or perhaps I should say none that I am willing to accept as evidence for god rather than for something else.
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Religious / political differences have caused more bloodshed and human suffering than any other thing in the history of the world. All the good they have done is not going to make up for that. Ever.
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Well, religion and politics are the two ways we humans interact on the largest scales. We form love bonds, friendships and acquaintances in much more limited numbers, but our political and religious organizations can be huge. We hurt our lovers and friends from time to time, but is it any wonder that there is less suffering caused by our more limited and local relationships than by the more general and far-reaching ones?
But I think what you've missed is that religion is just one more of man's incessant search for answers to the perplexing questions of life. Unfortunately, in my view, it is a search in the wrong place -- outside of ourselves. We are human, and the answers to human issues must, perforce, be human in origin.
And the real tragedy of religion is that the answers that religion provides, while human, are never human at the level that it counts most -- the individual. (I say religion's answers are "human" because that is the only source that I believe for them. While many claim "revelation," I reject that because it is not possible that a deity would choose such an error-prone means of dispensing the most important information in the universe.)