Space cowboy's Journal: Anti organised-religion rant

[Well this started off as part of a comment on that Ashcroft nutter, but on reflection I decided to remove it from the mainstream post; it wasn't really relevant.]

It's interesting how western religion (an artifical social-control hierarchy) _almost_ always teaches that sex is taboo, to be limited and used to manipulate social behaviour in ways that further that social-control, sorry religion.

These religions tend to promise wonderful results (once you're dead!) or terrible suffering (again, once you're dead!) if you do/don't do what that 'authority' says as well... No easy way to argue against that without dying for the cause, which is a bit extreme when you're agnostic or atheist :-)

Think about it: if some book claimed that some bloke in Israel had risen from the dead 200 years ago, would you believe it ? Oh yeah, he was born from a virgin (riiiight!) and can walk on water too, not to mention he has a built-in replicator, though it's stuck on prawn sandwiches. Yes ? No ? If yes, well, all the more power to your elbow my fine delusional friend. Get out of your beliefs everything you can. If no, you either ascribe too much validity to the fact that the bible is *old*, or you'll agree with me that 'religious' people are just nutters.

There's nothing wrong per-se about being a nutter. A lot of successful people were completely nuts. The saying that there's a fine line between genius and insanity is quite a deep reflection on what being nuts is all about, IMHO, though I doubt it was meant that way when first coined.

What can be scary is when nutters try to change you, try to coerce you into their belief system (and I don't just mean religious beliefs here). When such a nutter holds high office, it gets serious - there's not much worse than a motivated nutter with power.

Overall, despite my aversion to it, I think religion does more good than harm. I think it gives people with little else to live for, a reason to live: to be good, honest, kind, the standard virtues. Western religious values have also been the foundation for most of the human rights we now take for granted. Perhaps it's just a phase that a society has to go through - a bit like all the spots that teenage males get at puberty...

Religion is also a bit like heroin (or, opium in a different century, I guess :-) Society wouldn't recover easily from the sudden removal of its dependence on religion as a crutch in life. Excising any cancer takes time, it needs to be gradual, and for religion the process is underway. I can live with that.

You're born. You live. You die. That's it. You should be perfectly happy with that. I am. Consider the alternative.

Simon.

Morals and ethics from religious laws

[miu]

I don't believe that morals and ethics laws transfer from religion to practice at a very high rate, and when they do transfer it is form and not content that is actually followed.

So you wind up with a philanthropic tradition that is an excuse for self promotion in Christian countries. You wind up with the crucifixion used to forgive ongoing bad behavior because believers are "saved for all time". You wind up with the Shinto reverence for nature transformed into lip service in the form of Bonsai, flower ar

Re:Morals and ethics from religious laws

[Space cowboy]

I'm not actually too upset that religious convictions don't lead to civil ones - the religious societies that have evolved that way tend to be somewhat extreme in their penalties...

I do think a sense of morals, right and wrong, "do unto others as you would be done unto" etc. has passed into the collective conciousness of Western democracy. Unless you believe that people are inherently 'good' and 'selfless' (I believe they're inherently selfish :-) then the ideas had to come from somewhere, and a 2000-year-