Spirituality: being intelligent and self-aware enough to realise one'S own mortality and thus asking where one comes from, where one goes when dying, and how much time one has. This can but must not necessarily lead to theistic believing.

Those who seek just comfort and a safe feeling, tend to go with believing. Those feeling a burning desire to know, tend to stay away from religious dogmas, but trying to find out themselves. Dogmas don'T want to be analysed and questioned. They want obedience and conformity.

Religion: the attempt of actively giving a man-made meaning to life and man-made answers to the existential questions of Why?, Where from?, Where to? and How long?, in form of symbols that in a mythological manner represent the condensate of a tradiiton of earlier tales on egeneration has given to the next generation. Such tales can be theistic by content, or not. They are unavailable for reasonable examination to confirm their claims. Typically, believeing them in a literal, word-for-word manner is a characteristic for both theiostic and non-theistic religions by which the emerging hierarchy of profiteers (institutions, priests) ground their power and influence over people.

Thus, spirituality and relgion are antagonists. You cannot be both. The one is wanting to learn oneself by own experience and not taking just somebody's word for anything. The other is not seeing the need to verify claims in any way, but just believing them. There is a fundamental difference in quality.

Mystic traditions of Christianity, Chan/Zen-Buddhism, also atheism as far as the atheist in question does not deny a desire to understand the fundamentals of his existence, can be understood as "spirituality". Churches, sects, fundamentalists of all religious traditions, orthodox Judaism and Islam, various culture-specific schools of Buddhism that replaced Buddha's teaching with a whole pantheon of deities and figure-based manifestations of "Buddha-qualities", are just religion.

The truth is utmost simple, and utmost direct. It'S all around you, it is in you, it all is one, and it is only your own terms and ideas and thoughts keeping your awareness from realising this, it is the darkness of those names and conceptions your mind constantly invents that cloud your mind. Thus, as Huang-Po put it: "free yourself of everything. There is nothing that could be gained and so nothing needs to be just believed in order to acchieve "it".

That is hardly a "religion". That is life, and a state of mind in which to meet it as well as death.

By experience I would describe it exactly the other way around. Whenever I witness a fight between relgious and atheists people over here, in the media, in real life situation, it is that atheists defend themselves against claims and edemands directed at them to tolerate the special additional rights relgions demand becasue they are oh so religious. To me, one of the best arguments against religions is - the behaviour of self-claimed religious people itself, and their tendency to constantly stick their nose into other people'S business for which they do not have to mind at all.

In a secular state, where there is freedom of relgion, there necessarily also is freedom from relgion. Any cult's or religion'S freedom ends where it starts to limit the freedoms of those not sharing their dogma. That is true for Islam. Ands that is true for Christian churches and fundamentalists alike. Where any relgion claims that by its believes it has the duty to missionise and turn over the community, all I can say: fight it and bring it to a halt before you end up living in a theocracy. And ALL religions have the inherent drive to establoish themselves as theocracies. They vary only in the level of aggressiveness by which they pursue that intention.

So you don't think that thousands of years of butchery in the name of whatever god has anything to do with that negative image?

Well anyone can be misguided, religious or not, believer or not, but you do bring up the point that in a group, such as a congregation, their misguidance can be magnified by both their numbers and also their commitment to their cause. I still think that a majority of the time the ringleaders are more sociopath than true believers though.

Besides, what constitutes a religion is a pretty wide range of organization types. You can't talk about say the Westboro Baptists and the Roman Catholic Church like they were the same exact thing. There are just too many differences in too many areas to make the comparison.

Sure it does. But who usually orchestrates such butchery? A true believer or those driven by greed and personal power?

I guess you could try and compare fundamentalist Islam with atheism, to see which is more intolerant, but atheism has no doctrine, no commandments, no dogma, etc., and thus does not and cannot compel anyone to be intolerant of anything. You'd just be comparing apples and oranges.

Please, please read the Old Testament, read about all the divine infanticide, genocide and ecocide, and then say there is nothing stomach churning about it.

If you'll go back you'll note that the original quote had nothing to do with passages from a book but was aimed God directly. Apples and oranges yourself.

Yea we really need to send some Navy SEALs out there to find this "God" guy and haul his butt in front of the Hague. He has a lot to answer for... :03:

Guess who commanded/perpetrated those things. What does that say about that entity?

It says that even God can be misquoted.

Angus if you don't believe in God then it's hypocritical of you to imply that a book written by men contains the words of God.

I think I'll go to bed now, with this last thought:

People, theists and atheists, could do better.

I don't argue that, because you're right. I'm just saying that I don't think you can blame the atheists for all that negative image.

I don't hate religion for what has been done in its name so much as I dislike the things that have been done in its name.

Let's also not forget, though, that a lot of good things have also been done in the name of religion.

Otherwise, I often side with atheists, and then surprise people with the announcement that I personally see myself as Christian. I think Schleiermacher's defenses of religion sum it up best for me - that religion is NOT and never should be a set of moral or metaphysical rules. Instead all it is is just that feeling of dependence on something that's great and infinite, something beyond yourself. You can't justify it, but you don't need to. If you only believe that one thing and follow it through, you don't need anything else - because it reasonably leads to things that many Christians mistake for God-given laws, rules and obligations. You don't need to tell someone that they shouldn't lie, cheat and steal if they have a more general sense of responsibility for the world and a relationship with not just the present, but something that's there for all time. And in that view, texts and moral rules are not the source of beliefs - but just their historical consequences that should, perhaps, be taken with a grain of salt, because they appeared in very different times and to very different people than we are. You have to learn to get past that and draw the real lessons from the essence of the teaching. And in the case of Christianity, I believe that essence is very, very simple, very powerful, and 100% personal on a human level. Unlike so many other religions, the core message of the religion has no preconditions for being received, requires no rituals, nor asks you to give up your individual self. Christianity is the religion of the poor sinner, not because every Christian needs to be a poor sinner, but because its 'price of admission' is one that even the most impoverished of us can easily afford. And that's the beauty of it, I guess.

Bolded for truth. :yeah: :rock: