Religion In A Clubby Hole

If religion were just a private club for loonies and the misguided and those being taken advantage of, carrying on its practices behind closed doors with its incense and its candles and its dressing up and its peculiar rituals and its collections, that would be okay, more or less.

But it isn’t just a private club. It has taken custody of "good". Religion claims the right to determine what is good, and what is bad/evil, and it appropriates unto itself the right to tell the rest of us what to think and how to think on various subjects, and what ’being bad’ is.

Look at our youngsters. Children are the most easily influenced and that is why most religions target children to ingrain their blind beliefs, which become hard to erase later in life.

Seeing the direct and indirect religious conflicts around the world, why should not there be a minimum age, say 16, after which children can be exposed to this ’opium’ of the masses?

Religion is dangerous. Too often it finds itself on the front page - directly or indirectly linked to violence, crimes, drugs, rape and wars. Too many wars have been fought about religion - Hitlers Germany and Milosevics Bosnia are classic examples of state religious terror. Saudi Arabia is another classic example of states using religion to control its subjects - a misuse of emotions.

To claim to speak with authority on behalf of a ’god’ on various subjects when the reality seems to be that they are just making it up on the back of an old envelope on a whim and they grab any old text and claim that text is the word of a god is fundamentally dishonest.

If religion can’t say, hand on heart, "this is definitely what a god thinks, he told us so", then they should shut up and stop making it up.

We are put in this club or that (Muslim, Christian, Protestant, Church of the Yellow Rabbit) before we can think for ourselves. There, often, we tend to stay, even once we can think for ourselves. The music may be rather nice. The social gatherings may be rather nice. What being religious (and therefore righteous?) says about us may be rather nice. Too nice to leave, whatever we believe.

One has to distinguish between (a) being in a particular club (a matter of social convenience and status) and (b) believing what the club pretends to believe (an entirely different issue).

At a guess, probably most members of any particular religion don’t actually believe what the religion pretends to believe, but that isn’t a bar to attendance or membership. The more the merrier. So the farce that religion is, continues.

It is unfortunate that most religous comments to not contain the warning (even in small print): this or that is just a theory and may in the fullness of time be proved to be completely untrue or completely or partially true... we just don’t know at the moment and theologists are working on proofs but for the past 10,000 years have failed to find them. Noneless most monks, priests, churchwardens and choirboys think that for the time being it is seems a plausible theory even though plenty of people think it implausible, but hey their opinions aren’t worth a row of beans because "generally accepted religious opinion" overrides scepticism until the weight of evidence causes a theory to be regarded as untenable... eg ’an eye for an eye’ as defunct compared to flavour of the decade, the ’turn the other cheek’ ideology, but both are equally admissiblable and merely ideologies, yet the latter appears to be more acceptable, though the former was more acceptable in earler centuries. The religious community apologises in advance if by the time you read this text, the theory is disproved and replaced by something else... "

It amuses me that the church - not known for its support for homosexuals - has been run by them for centuries.

Being a priest was one of the only ways of hiding your indifference to women in society without getting a red hot poker rammed up your jacksie.

... and let’s not forget nuns.

Why is it that religious people get very excited at finding a line in the holy book prohibiting homosexual acts, but they go all quiet when you point out the bits that talk about blood sacrifice or killing members of your own family to show your love of God? Sanctimonious cherry pickers, the lot of them.

The problem with debates on religion is that they turn into an "us-versus-them" affair with all secularists branded as unreconstructed atheists and enemies of the faith, and all believers as irrational and fanatical. You cannot compare religion with science, but only with other religions. Political religion is a real danger in the future.

One Religion can only compare itself with another. Camparing religion with science is an ego-trip for the religiously blinded.

The differences are glaring to the open minded : Religion stands only on individual and therefore very subjective beliefs (and some ancient writings of disputed origin and interpretation) while science is based on theories put the test by objective, commonly observable fact and event. Sure, some theories are disproved, and the more we learn the more intelligent newer theories can become. Science learns from its mistakes. Religions never admit to ever having been mistaken.

Religion : subjective
Science : objective

Science can be tested - and perchance found wanting, of course. Religion cannot allow itself to be tested, because of claims to ’truth’ and having all the answers. Just that sometimes the answer is a different one from last time. Humbug!

Will the world ever manage to get rid of religion? Probably not. We are stuck with it.
I am always shocked when those who consider themselves to be ’intelligent’ (I am thinking of Bush and Blair, among others) continue to believe that their lives are controlled by a man who lives in the sky.

If an alien landed from another planet and was told ’I have never seen God, I just know he’s there, and he can see what everyone is doing at the same time, and I go into a building and sing songs to Him..’ they would faint with incredulity.
Not to mention ’when I am dead, I will carry on living, if I behave myself now’...

Unfortunately people who believe this sort of stuff have the ear and maybe heart (if not brain) of the world’s only remaining super-power. Christianity doesn’t have the monopoly on religious bigots. Religion and its obsession with genitalia may be mildly amusing at first glance....but sadly I don’t think it’s harmless and I don’t think it’s going away.