Before I say anything else I wanted to express my happiness in the resigning of White House Press Secretary and Chief Spin Doctor Scott McClellan. This guy was a dick, plain and simple. He's been the voice of this horrible administration since the beginning of the war and I'm ecstatic to see him go.
Today there was an hour long interview with this Army Chaplain who claimed that within the trenches there are no Athiests. That Jesus is the only savior to those who are good of heart, and Muslims are violent and their religion promotes violence. My religious views are radical, but I definitely feel that Islam, Christianity and Judiasm should all basically be the same religion. They are all based from the same old book and have the exact same forefathers. But organized religion is not the same as what the religions were intended to be. Islam has become synonimous with oppression and tyranny just as Christianity was during the middle ages. Judiasm may not be oppressive on the same scale as Islam or Christianity, but go to the West Bank and tell me that Jews aren't oppressing others.
Jesus may be a symbol for things good and pure, but Christianity is corrupt and full of atrocities in its history. Anyone ever hear of the Spanish Inquisition? I seem to recall some highly religious Christians committing atrocities against Jews and other non-Christians simply because they didn’t accept Jesus as the savior. Christians have this clouded view of the violent world they’ve helped to create, as most conflicts in Western history have been a result of religion. Believing in some magical ghost who floats around everyone and somehow answers prayers of 6,000,000,000 people is not the key to happiness. Being a good person, dedicating one’s life to improving the lives of others without forcing religious views upon them and leaving the world a better place than when you entered it are the key, and people who preach religion and Jesus and the Bible just aren’t helping this world. Religion stifles progress: The world is flat, the sun revolves around the Earth, the planet is only 6,000 years old, and we are all descended from the Caucasian couple Adam and Eve. Maybe it’s just me, but anyone who argues with science and preaches intolerance of other religions and homosexuals is not a benefit to society. If we listened to religion, we'd still be in the dark ages, killing each other over intrepretations of the bible (oh wait, they already do that...look at Northern Ireland if you don't believe me) and we'd certainly not have the technology we have today.
What really bothers me about religion is how people preach it as the answer when all it really does stifle those answers. How did the world begin? Religious people believe in a creation myth created by people who lived over 2000 years ago in a primitive world. Why are we here? God put us here to entertain himself...How did we become human? We were born that way when the Earth was spontaneously created with fully developed life, we're made of mud and women are made of ribs. People actually read the bible and think it's supposed to be literal. IT IS NOT LITERAL! It is a book of myths. Do you actually think that Moses lived to be 150? Umm, we have medical technology now and they didn't then, our oldest recorded human lived to be just over 120. Rational, intelligent people cannot believe in the bible literally, it's just fiction. Imagine if in 1500 years everyone on the planet followed "Aesop's Fables" as if it was the Bible. It's the same thing. There is this Evangelical man on the radio right now and he says that we should look at the world in a biblical view. This scares me because at least 30,000,000 people in this nation think this way, and that number is probably closer to 150,000,000.
Theocracies are highly dangerous societies. Internally they are oppressive and tyrannical, and externally they are confrontational and warlike. Bush always talks about god, he even claims that god speaks to him, and he manages his foreign and domestic policy based on these views. America is becoming a Christian Theocracy, we are oppressing Muslims and anyone who doesn't fit into the Evangelical world view. The worst part of this is on Fox News: they claim a war against Christian values, they even have a mini-series about that. Is it me, or have I given up on saying "I'm not Christian" when people wish me a happy Easter, Christmas or even New Year (Christian calendar is not the same as the Jewish, Muslim, Chinese, Aztec...) because almost everyone in this country is Christian? Organized Religion does nothing to benefit mankind, as it tries to stifle any medical research or other scientific progress.
When I envision the future, I see a world where we take the good parts of all world religions (including Animist and Voodoo religions) and everyone uses the knowledge to form their own relevant personal belief system. Organized religion is corrupt by nature. Religion should also be a living entity, continually growing and adapting to society, not the other way around. Instead of using religion to slow progress, it should be used to aid in modernizing the world. Shouldn't Christians want to spread the knowledge to extend life through stem-cell research? To me it's a no-brainer...but then again, religious people are also no-brainers to me.
Today there was an hour long interview with this Army Chaplain who claimed that within the trenches there are no Athiests. That Jesus is the only savior to those who are good of heart, and Muslims are violent and their religion promotes violence. My religious views are radical, but I definitely feel that Islam, Christianity and Judiasm should all basically be the same religion. They are all based from the same old book and have the exact same forefathers. But organized religion is not the same as what the religions were intended to be. Islam has become synonimous with oppression and tyranny just as Christianity was during the middle ages. Judiasm may not be oppressive on the same scale as Islam or Christianity, but go to the West Bank and tell me that Jews aren't oppressing others.
Jesus may be a symbol for things good and pure, but Christianity is corrupt and full of atrocities in its history. Anyone ever hear of the Spanish Inquisition? I seem to recall some highly religious Christians committing atrocities against Jews and other non-Christians simply because they didn’t accept Jesus as the savior. Christians have this clouded view of the violent world they’ve helped to create, as most conflicts in Western history have been a result of religion. Believing in some magical ghost who floats around everyone and somehow answers prayers of 6,000,000,000 people is not the key to happiness. Being a good person, dedicating one’s life to improving the lives of others without forcing religious views upon them and leaving the world a better place than when you entered it are the key, and people who preach religion and Jesus and the Bible just aren’t helping this world. Religion stifles progress: The world is flat, the sun revolves around the Earth, the planet is only 6,000 years old, and we are all descended from the Caucasian couple Adam and Eve. Maybe it’s just me, but anyone who argues with science and preaches intolerance of other religions and homosexuals is not a benefit to society. If we listened to religion, we'd still be in the dark ages, killing each other over intrepretations of the bible (oh wait, they already do that...look at Northern Ireland if you don't believe me) and we'd certainly not have the technology we have today.
What really bothers me about religion is how people preach it as the answer when all it really does stifle those answers. How did the world begin? Religious people believe in a creation myth created by people who lived over 2000 years ago in a primitive world. Why are we here? God put us here to entertain himself...How did we become human? We were born that way when the Earth was spontaneously created with fully developed life, we're made of mud and women are made of ribs. People actually read the bible and think it's supposed to be literal. IT IS NOT LITERAL! It is a book of myths. Do you actually think that Moses lived to be 150? Umm, we have medical technology now and they didn't then, our oldest recorded human lived to be just over 120. Rational, intelligent people cannot believe in the bible literally, it's just fiction. Imagine if in 1500 years everyone on the planet followed "Aesop's Fables" as if it was the Bible. It's the same thing. There is this Evangelical man on the radio right now and he says that we should look at the world in a biblical view. This scares me because at least 30,000,000 people in this nation think this way, and that number is probably closer to 150,000,000.
Theocracies are highly dangerous societies. Internally they are oppressive and tyrannical, and externally they are confrontational and warlike. Bush always talks about god, he even claims that god speaks to him, and he manages his foreign and domestic policy based on these views. America is becoming a Christian Theocracy, we are oppressing Muslims and anyone who doesn't fit into the Evangelical world view. The worst part of this is on Fox News: they claim a war against Christian values, they even have a mini-series about that. Is it me, or have I given up on saying "I'm not Christian" when people wish me a happy Easter, Christmas or even New Year (Christian calendar is not the same as the Jewish, Muslim, Chinese, Aztec...) because almost everyone in this country is Christian? Organized Religion does nothing to benefit mankind, as it tries to stifle any medical research or other scientific progress.
When I envision the future, I see a world where we take the good parts of all world religions (including Animist and Voodoo religions) and everyone uses the knowledge to form their own relevant personal belief system. Organized religion is corrupt by nature. Religion should also be a living entity, continually growing and adapting to society, not the other way around. Instead of using religion to slow progress, it should be used to aid in modernizing the world. Shouldn't Christians want to spread the knowledge to extend life through stem-cell research? To me it's a no-brainer...but then again, religious people are also no-brainers to me.
posted by Dan Pasternack at 1:28 PM
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