In article ,
Doug Freyburger wrote:

Billy wrote:
Doug Freyburger wrote:

Based on your experience with one religion and your having been poisoned
by it.

How do you differentiate being poisoned from awareness of hypocrisy?

Awareness of hypocricy is acknowledging the errors of a specific
religion. Look carefully and any faith will have some problems. To
assume that all suffer from the same problems is to be poisoned. They
do not.

Hypocrisy is saying one thing, and doing another.

I guess what bothers me is your out and out dismissal of Nad's
revelations, not that they are superior or inferior to your's. I'm
inclined to see religions as power structures (and we all know what
power does) that place themselves between the believer and their god.
That the god of love and mercy can be morphed into Jerry Falwell's god
of jealousy and revenge, is beyond my ability to reconcile.
That we are called on to worship this god is offensive to my democratic
principals. Call it hubris, if you will, but I have a much easier time
believing that a perfectly good religion can be based on a pack of lies,
especially if it exhorts its followers to reason.

Many good things have been done in the name of god, the Quakers come to
mind, as well as religiously funded clinics, schools, and water
projects. I can relate to an extent to Nad's situation, in that when I
was a teenager I started to question the church I belonged to, when they
shunned a church member who became pregnant out of wedlock. I briefly
considered converting to Judiasm, but the examination of hypocrisy that
I had started on with Christianity soon overwhelmed any possibility that
I could believe in Judaism. Buddhism (not a religion, but still a
belief) seems the only hypocrisy free belief, until you come to the
philosophical schism between Hinayana, and Mahayana Buddists.

I won't post again on this thread, bbut I will read any response that
you may have.

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I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or
has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves. An
individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my
comprehension, such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble
souls.
- Albert Einstein

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a
lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a
personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly.
If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the
unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our
science can reveal it.
- Albert Einstein

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If you like weekends (8 hr./day & 40 hr./week), thank a labor union.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYIC0eZYEtI
http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2011/3/7/michael_moore
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZkDikRLQrw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyE5wjc4XOw