Bad Religion?

[Theocrat]

Well things are being exposed to the public here in sweden concerning organized and mindcontrolling sects. One in particular is getting the headlines after some murders have taken place (Knutby).
At first i wasn't even remotely interested in the event, but now i find myself reading about the issue more and more.. In short i think Christianity really sucks..

I also think organized religion to some extent is the worst agent to ever walk this earth. But it's also easy to blame the religion. But it's always the people who get, either a distorted view, or use it to premote their sick views or use it to get control. Alot of christians see the devil in this or the devil in that. But it is really unhealthy to distance oneself from the world in that way. Which is why alot of sick individuals are drawn to it's allure of only accepting the good. And not really accepting how other people have chosen to live their lives. And locking up sexuality within the confines of marriage really isn't healthy either. For a few it might work but for many people its restricting. And we've all heard of the problems many christians have with homosexuality.

Many past religions weren't always any better. Like infant sacrifices in Phoenicia. Or any type of human sacrifice oriented religions. Imagine getting a paper from the local temple, to at a certain date give up this or that member of the family for sacrifice, doesn't look pretty does it.. :?

Even here in scandinavia there was a religion (dunno if it was during or before the viking period) that had the element of strangling certain individuals with a rope in bogs and tossing them in the water of these presumed 'holy' places.

So this wave of paganism doesn't get my vote. Shamanism might.

Even though i dispise human sacrifices i find the topic somewhat fascinating.

Hey! I managed to squeeze two topics in one thread. Or maybe i'm just getting "Barmy"... :)

[DeeCrowSeer]

Those are some good ones, guys. That last one is hilarious, DCS!

Then I really ought to mention that it's from Hedwig and the Angry Inch... it's on the movie soundtrack CD, but not actually in the movie. I also ought to mention that it ROCKS!

As for organized religion and such, I would just like to state for the record that I know religion can be a great comfort to people and many religious groups have done, and continue to do, a great deal of good in the world. I am drawn to anti-Christian messages mostly in an attempt to "break the programming" which I've been subjected to throughout my life, causing me a great deal of personal shame and confusion and doubt, etc. In other words, I am not trying to attack anyone else's beliefs, simply trying to defend myself against them.

Lucky for me that the majority of Christian music is so utterly terrible, that I'm not really missing out on a great deal because of my prejudices... my school used to invite Christian Rock bands in to play for us, so I know whereof I speak.

D...

[Theocrat]

Lucky for me that the majority of Christian music is so utterly terrible, that I'm not really missing out on a great deal because of my prejudices... my school used to invite Christian Rock bands in to play for us, so I know whereof I speak.

D...

Stryper is back also... It's horryfic! :x Soon they'll be tossing bibels at the audience again..

A friend of mine said something i thought was somewhat naive but at the same time quite true. "I don't think GOD likes Heavy Metal"... :?

[DeeCrowSeer]

Stryper is back also... It's horryfic! :x Soon they'll be tossing bibels at the audience again..

To be fair Stryper did put some effort into their outfits. It very nearly distracted you from the music... I wonder if the striped tights were supposed to be hypnotic? "Read my thighs! Jesus died for your sins!" 8O

D...

[Omaru]

Stryper is back also... It's horryfic! :x Soon they'll be tossing bibels at the audience again..

A friend of mine said something i thought was somewhat naive but at the same time quite true. "I don't think GOD likes Heavy Metal"... :?

No god I'd ever believe in would like Christian Rock, I'll tell you that much. :mrgreen:

[zakt]

DeeCrowSeer wrote:

As for organized religion and such, I would just like to state for the record that I know religion can be a great comfort to people and many religious groups have done, and continue to do, a great deal of good in the world.

That's why it's so disappointing when many religious individuals and groups so consistently prove themselves to be just as fallible as the rest of us. We shouldn't be surprised - they are, after all, human. But if you set yourself up as being more enlightened, to the extent remember that for many Christians they and they alone will be going to eternal life, then you'd better make sure you act more enlightened, not be found with your trousers down and your snout in the trough.

But over and above that, at the end of the day, religion typically justifies misery today in the hope of ecstacy the day after the day after tomorrow.

By the way, does anyone else not like Heavy Metal?

[DeeCrowSeer]

But over and above that, at the end of the day, religion typically justifies misery today in the hope of ecstacy the day after the day after tomorrow.

That's the part I always had trouble rationalizing. We're born to live a hundred years on Earth, and then (based on how we cope with the conflicting messages and interesting times with which we're presented) we're sorted neatly into the sinners and saints. The sinners spend eternity in Hell with the Devil, and the saints spend eternity in Heaven with God. Why not skip the whole mortality test altogether and just sort everyone out before they're born. if God knows EVERYTHING, then he already knows how worthwhile your life will be from the moment you're born to the moment you die... unless God doesn't actually know EVERYTHING, in which case he is fallible and the whole thing - GAH! Now I've given myself a headache again.:?

Fun Fact: At Infants' School (ages 4-7) we were told that everyone has a Little Jesus inside them, and when you see someone doing something bad and think: "I should stop them doing that bad thing", that's your Little Jesus talking! What does your Little Jesus tell you?

D...

[Theocrat]

Fun Fact: At Infants' School (ages 4-7) we were told that everyone has a Little Jesus inside them, and when you see someone doing something bad and think: "I should stop them doing that bad thing", that's your Little Jesus talking! What does your Little Jesus tell you?

D...

He tells me to masturbate constantly! :) *Just Kidding*

That sorting out of sinners and saints doesn't hack it for me.
If their is some sort of real justice it would be Karma. But in that we experience how we made other people feel throughout our life come back at the moment of death. Imagine hitler going through all those victims.. Now thats divine justice i guess.. At the end i really think we end up in the same place.

[zakt]

DeeCrowSeer wrote:

That's the part I always had trouble rationalizing. We're born to live a hundred years on Earth, and then (based on how we cope with the conflicting messages and interesting times with which we're presented) we're sorted neatly into the sinners and saints.

There's a book by James Hogg (early 19th Century Scots "shepherd poet") called The True memoirs & Confessions of a Justified Sinner which, if nothing else, justified my time in higher education. It's the story of a radical predestinarian Calvinist in 17th century, whose core belief is that the "elect" are destined from birth (or before) to join god in heaven, and that it is belief rather than actions which sorts out the elect from the damned. As you can imagine, it leads to all sorts of problems, especially as his main adviser, whilst adopting the role of another of the elect, has more than a hint of sulphur about him. It was an acknowledged (I think) influence on Jeckyll & Hyde, but is sadly less well known today. In his self-delusion, he also bears more than a passing resemblance to a certain Russian adventurer of the 20th Century. I wonder if by any chance they could be related? :?

[VonWeiner]

Here's what Thomas Jefferson had to say about religion, and Christianity in particular:

I have examined all the known superstitions of the world, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the earth.


--Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Short

[Whiskers]

I was raised Baptist (Missionary not Southern). There is a song, JESUS LOVES THE LITTLE CHILDREN, which talks about Jesus loving all the little children. You know the one, "red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight". This didn't seem to extend to adolescent and adult reds, yellows and blacks. The older I got the more I realized our congregation were hateful racists who would use racial slurs outside of the church. To this day my father feels that our fore-fathers "created a huge problem by bringin' 'em over here". I spend very little time with my parents these days because of the passive and overt racism.

The hypocrisy lies in the missionary of Missionary Baptist part. Our church never wandered into our neighborhoods spreading the word. The church is in Whittier California still, I think, and the monolithic church that my parents and others built was an unwelcoming and sterile structure smack dab in the inexpensive part of town where low income and Mexican families lived. Did we go into that community and spread The Gospel? Of course not.

Racism was so acceptable in our household (not that we practiced it every day or had training) that one time I used racial slurs to describe Hispanics in front of my aunt who was Hispanic. This was a landmark event for me. I recall this as the moment I began to be driven out of the church by its hypocrisy and when I began to understand that our church was rotten to the core. A random bad experience? I don't think so.

Now that I'm a big boy I can see other little problems. Can anyone tell me when a god fearing Christian is instructed and empowered by God to start beating their children? If Jesus loves the little children, why does he allow the thrashing to occur in the middle of the fucking church services? And that's where it starts, doesn't it? In early childhood. Do you start pounding your kid at 1? 2? I tell you, I’ve seen 2 year olds getting thrashed. And this is a unified methodology. I'm no child physician or psychologist, but something tells me that early childhood might be a bad time to start beating your own flesh and blood. What happen to the compassion that Christ is supposed to have for us? Are we only worthy once we've been fully tenderized? For those who must know and need to discredit my arguments, yes, I've had my ass beaten in a church. But thank God, my parents don't even need to ask for forgiveness, why? It's mandated in the King James Version of the Bible.

Here in Washington churches, including Baptists, are rotten little businesses that don’t even adhere correctly to their own theology. My parents have surfed from church to church seeking the truth. In the beginning it’s “a true church Berry� and “God has lead us here� (forget that the church is 5 minutes away from the house) and by the end of 3 years some thievery by the clergy or some other nastiness and “God is calling us to a different church�. Hey Baptist, why did God lead you to a false church? Does God actually do business, errrr, work through false churches?

This wicked corner of religion is broken people.

[krunky]

Good one VW!

Many of the "Founding Fathers" of the U.S. were in the way of what is called a Deist: Here's a definition of Deism: The belief, based solely on reason, in a God who created the universe and then abandoned it, assuming no control over life, exerting no influence on natural phenomena, and giving no supernatural revelation.

Basically they were merely recognizing that some kind of prime moving force set the universe in motion. That's about it.

Of course, Xtians are constantly trying to point to mention of God here or there in our foundational legal texts as a pretext for imposing Xtian ideals upon others - but I doubt the "founders" themselves would have let them get away with anything like that at all, however limited.

Personally, I think Jefferson et al used the idea of God as a political expedient - just to get their way. It's a pity that we are still paying for many of the expediencies of passing the various foundational documents of the U.S.

[krunky]

Berry, your story reminds of something odd I said yesterday. I was buying a money order and was to recieve 4 cents in change. Now 4 cents is obviously next to worthless and I kinda hate carrying around a lot of unneeded change - so I suggested to the cashier that she keep the change for her cash drawer (so as not to come up short perhaps due to minor errors). She claimed she couldn't accept it because the store had a policy of cash drawers NOT totalling up over - it would mean that she had shortchanged customers! So I said: "Wow, they take gyping the customer very seriously then..."

The minute it flew from my lips I felt badly, because to "gyp" someone is a slang term that derives from the word "gypsy." The implication being that gypsies are swindlers. That's right up there with the idea of being "jewed" down for a price - that Jewish people are shrewd bargainers.

I hate noticing stuff like that in my automatic speech patterns. Apparently, my ability to articulate an idea without resorting to racially loaded terms has been mixed over the years...one tries though. I must have said the exact phrase: "Man, what a gyp!" a thousand times as a child.

[DeeCrowSeer]

I think my closest experience to that would be how as children we always used to sing a little rhyme to see who was "out" in a game, and it went:

"Eeenie, meenie, mine-y, mo,
Catch a n*gger by his toe,
If he hollers,
Let him go,Eeenie, meenie, mine-y, mo."
Eventually I realized what I was singing and changed the offending word to "vicar" (ho ho). But yes, not only a highly offensive word, but also a reference to slavery and the practice of removing slaves' toes if they tried to run away or cause trouble. It was a two-for-one on bad karma.

Hypocrisy in Churchies was proven at my CofE school by the teachers who had affairs, embezzled or ran away with under-age pupils! And most of them were fairly mean and unforgiving on principle. Bless 'em!
D...

[zakt]

DeeCrowSeer says:

think my closest experience to that would be how as children we always used to sing a little rhyme to see who was "out" in a game, and it went:

"Eeenie, meenie, mine-y, mo,
Catch a n*gger by his toe,
If he hollers,
Let him go,Eeenie, meenie, mine-y, mo."

We used to say "Catch a tiger by the toe". I'm a bit puzzled about that, as it was 1960s/70s rural Scotland, which is not usually a haven of political correctness.

It's all conditioning - some branches of our family have passed racism down through three generations, whereas I hope that our kids would cut their tongue out rather than use the terms (or have the attitudes) their cousins do. They are not bad people - but their parents' and grandparents' prejudices were and are stronger than their sense of justice.