[Skybird]

Originally Posted by P_Funk

Are you kidding? You're telling me a zombie carpenter of immaculate birth is more plausible than the CIA or the Mafis shot JFK?

What is it they say, people are willing to forgive the big lies more readily than the small ones?

Religion and the church are theoretically two separate things, but how many people hold a faith where they don't ascribe to the beliefs espoused by a particular church? Why do we need pastors and priests and fathers and imams and so on if faith can exist outside the church? Really, how many truly faithful chrsitians don't go to church? How much of modern religion is made up of positive moral attitudes versus the flat statement that to be faithful is to respect the church?

I believe that religion is a result of the rational human being confronting the irrational nature of the world. Why is the internet likely to damage religion? Because the access to knowledge and the open minded education of people always immediately places a rational mind at odds with the fabrications sold to the followers of a faith.

If religion has such value to us then why is it the bastion of narrow mindedness? Why is it that the body of power that must be fought for freeing most of our modern attitudes is usually centred in our old religions?

I'm not going to say that we don't owe a great deal of our identity to the history as it was propelled forward through a christian, jewish, or muslim light. I would not undo the great basilicas that litter Europe or forget the stories of gallant knights and all that. But thats not justification for letting it direct us once we've outgrown it.

The church is a power base. Its no different than Stalinist Russia. Its a means toward control. How much of Christianity is merely a construct devised to absorb control of the major elements of daily life? For centuries in Europe marriage was a tribal rite, something altogether secular, entirely political or perhaps romantic. It was only cneturies after Christ was allegedly crucified that the Church appropriated that institution for itself. Today Christians would have you believe they invented it.

I may admire some religious people, I may respect them as people, but whatever merit religion has is easily outweighed by the terrible toll of human suffering its inflicted in the name of "Faith in God".

I personally much more admire the polytheistic pagan culture of pre-Christ. The greeks were far more interesting in their beliefs. The gods were just like people, filled with emotion, conflicted, great and terrible, an excellent example how religion is borne of the relationship between man's rational mind and the irrational world and our need to make the two meet up. However, the inevitable result of religion is that it centres itself in a powerful institution that seeks to maintain its control with no respect towards even the values that it itself purports to hold majesty over.

Monotheism just gives me a headache.

Two things.

First.

Religiosity, and spirituality. I may not use both terms in their precise verbal meaning as it is rooted the the origin of their languages, as a matter of fact I know for sure that I don't, but that'S why I explain how I use them, and I mjust give the idea behinbd my hijacking of thwem a form in order to verbally communicate. if i would invent new words, I nevertheless would need to explain them. So:

I understand spirituality to be the desire of a mind or consciousness, a living being that is, to answer the question of where it comes from, where it goes, how much time it has left, and why things exist instead of nothing. The big Why?-question, that is. This has an awareness for one's own existence and an understanding of oneself being mortal as a precondition. If you are not aware of yourself, if you do not have an idea of that one day what you consider to be existing will come to an end, inclduing your own existence, then you hardly come to asking these questions. You are driven by automatted insticnts and genetically encoded behaviour patterns instead, like many lower life forms for example. The more self-aware a mind is, the more spiritual in unavoidably is as well. The less self-aware it is, the less spiritual it can be.

Religion is dogma, is cult. The petrifying condensante of earlier rites and habits that got collected and desiogned to secure the power and priviliges of priesthood.Priesthood needs the people being dpeending on priests, else it has no basis for influence and priviliges granted anymore. Thus the discouragement of wanting to know for oneself, demonising secularism, scientiifc analsis, rational and reasionable examination -e specially of dogma. Dogma is not to be analysed, it is to be believed, and exlcusively so. Analsis would rip it apart, always. And dogma knows that! That'S why it is so hostile to intellectual analysis, scientific approach in examination claims made by dogma.

I am antireligious, nevertheless I am spiritual, and certainly I am atheist.

Second.

Why is man obviously so vulnerable to the desire of believing in relgions'S claims? The vast majroity of mankind walks into this trap. Why? The answer may be quite ironic both for believers and atheists, if they have some sense of humour left, though I think in general believers are seriously handicapped there. The vulnerability for wanting to believe in a metaphsiacal entity, justice, eye in the sky - probably is due evolution. I have read a good comparison that illustrates it, but I need to give a longer explanation to make the point clear.

The author talked about moths, and how they fly into open flames, killing themselves. This is a function of their behaviour that bases on a design process that has been formed by evolution, that is adaptation of moths to the world they live in since many hundreds of thosuands of years, giviong them the best design and set of features that in the time passed so far was possible to form up in the attanmpt to adapt better and better to the environment. Because they navigate, like many insects, by the sun, the moon, and also even by very bright stars, they watch them with their eyes - facette eyes. How are they constructed? Facette eyes (at least that is how they are called in German) are foprmed by a huge number of tubes of a slightly pyramidic shape, the inne rending bedeing narrow and the outer ending being wider. If you collect a huge amount of such tiny itenms, the outside forms the form of a spohere - the visible part of the insect'S eye. The eye then fixiates for example the moon, but the moon is visible only to a very small part of the many tunnels the eye is formed of, becasue the light needs to travel in a more or less straight line from the opoening down the tunnel to its inner ending. Its like fixiating an object through a straight, tube. Now if you look at the moon through such a tube it does not matter how far you run, a mile or a hundred miles, becasue the moon is so far away that yiour moevment doesn'T matter - you always have it at the same relative angle to your position (ignoring stellar movement for a moment...) But if you fixiate an objct, say a waste bin standing on the pavement, you need to turn your head when you change your position, because the object is so near that the change in relative position changes the angle from all beginning on. Same for the moth. It'S "viewing tunnel" (the facette in its eyes fixiating a light blip) gets fixiated not on the moon, but on a candle light. But the candle light is not 380 thousand kilometers away, but just two meters - the smallest movement of the moth chnages the facettes, the angle, chnages the way it sees it. But evoltuioin has dersigned it to fly a poath and navigate by keeping always the same facettes of its eyes fixiated on the - far far awar - light source. The candle light isnt, and so the moth has to fly a turn, a slight turn, to keep the same part of its eyes fixiated on the light source. It flies a spiral, and finall finds the spiral'S center - and it goes up in flames.

The author compares this to the vulnerablity of man for the authority of religious dogma. Evolution has sown our species by experience that it is wise if our young chiodren do not question the elder, but obey their warnings and orders. It may savbe their life if they get a snap at not to touch that poisenous snake, or to freeze in place with that leopard close by. Everybody having children knows that little children even tend to obey the authority of foreigners that give them an order. Often they are following these rules more willingkly, though intimidates, than orders by their parents! I have often witnessed that when visiting good friend of mine who have two little children. From a standpoint of evolutional adaptation, this make sense, obviously - else it would not have formed up in the first, and probably would have been altered.

Now comes Mr and Mrs priest and raise demands for being priviliged and they make claism and take an authoritarian pose. What do people do, esoeially the young ones whose minds are soft and unhardened, unexperienced and still klacking the independence to really think by themselves and form their own judgements, critically and distanced to expectations dircted at them? They believe them! What a surprise. And this also explains why relgion'S try to get influence over people'S minds even from cradle on. Once childhood is over, it ios so muczh more difficult to make peoplke submitting to dogma, and turnt hem into beloevers, since as adults their minds are stronger and more critical - at least that is to be hoped, isn't it. The probability to bind young minds to a religion is so much greater than the probability to turn adults who had grown up without being exposed to priesthoods and dogmas into converts.

So, when I say that evolution may be the reason of man's interest in falling for dogmas and beliefs, this does not necessarily mean that evoltuion wanted this effect tobe acchieved, like it also did not deisng moths to fly into open fire. Both are unwanted side effects that become a problem just short time ago, due to to new environmental factor arising that appeared just so short ago that evolution still had not time to alter the design over these new features, becasue this is a pricess that consumes a certainb ammount of time, and the adaptation thus always takes place with a delay.

Our vulnerability for religious - institutionalised, that is - authorities and dogmas thus is a sign of a still non-efficient, uncompleted adaptation process to these relatively new environmental factor. We are still little kids liostening to what the elder are telling them - that's it in a nutshell. Here is hope that once our evolution has progressed, we simply will have moved beyond this religious hokuspocus. The desire to find answers of the existential, metaphysical variety (the Why qustions I mentioned in the beginning), mjust not be effected by this, but could benefit from spirituality emancipaing itself from religiosity and relgious cult. I think that if we manage to survive beyond the next dercades and centuries, our relgions icnreaisngly will become more a culture of admiring the beuaty and evolutionary process that are laid before our eyes, and scientific reasonbiltiy and rational sanity will defeat superstitious hear-say and authoritarian dogmatic cult celebrated on the graves of millions and millions of innocent victims.