Subject: Re: Religion(I'm back. lol)
From: Gene (pariah1980@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Mar 01 2000 - 20:38:47 EST
> I think, before we go off on bashing stereotypes of
> organized religion, we
> need to take a decisive step back and draw a clear
> distinction between the
> religion and its practitioners. To re-examine our
> Christian example:
> Anyone with the guts to read the Bible critically
> will see that it does
> contain advice in areas of ethics, morality, and
> general behavior, that are
> still genuinely valuable today. However, this same
> ideal reader will also
> come to realize that other lessons that might have
> been applicable in the
> time of Moses, or Abraham, or even Jesus, are
> hopelessly out of touch with
> the 20th or 21st century.
>
> My other beef with organized religion is that, as
> soon as a sacred
> institution is granted ANY degree of secular power,
> corruption of that
> institution is inevitable. "In the beginning was
> the Word," and for as
> long as any organized religion manages to limit
> itself from going any
> further than that, its "truth" will survive. If a
> practitioner of a
> religion is diverted toward secular interests, (s)he
> is diverted away from
> the sacred doctrines at the root of the true
> religion, and any decrees made
> on this basis are merely corruption and meaningless
> dogma. This is
> certainly not to say that sacred texts contain no
> useful reference to
> secular behavior. However, when these references
> are ignored, or expanded
> beyond the realm of general benefit to humankind,
> the workers of the faith
> disease the hand of God. Religious teachings guide
> us toward spirituality
> and enlightenment; corrupt practitioners only lead
> us to the wolves' den.
I know I started this whole religious debate and sort
of abandoned it, but it's been a busy and hectic week
at school and I finally have some time to breathe!
lol.
I didn't mean to bash or put down religion, it's just
all the ambiguities and gray areas that are where
people seem to disagree and even kill and die over. I
agree that certain biblical practices in the Bible are
out of date while some are just as valuable. In fact,
before Moses was given the ten commandments, there
were so many rules and laws within Judaism(and I'm not
putting down Judaism because I've been studying all
religions and find so much stuff in common in each
one), that the people just couldn't follow them all.
So God reduced the number to 10, thus the ten
commandments. And they're real basic stuff that isn't
too hard to stick to.
I also agree that institutions are fallible(since they
are created by man and man is fallible "for all have
sinned and come short of the glory of God"), but my
main beef with religion is when people insist that
their way of practicing religion is superior to all
others and they seem to fight more over issues like
abortion, homosexuality, and censorship than they do
actual important things. I'm also a little wary when a
religious sect insists on only one way of seeing
things, or of seeing things in terms of absolute black
and white(i.e. something is either totally wrong and
evil or totally good and righteous). Again, this is
just my little perspective on things. After taking a
history class on the early European revolutions and
certain books("The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception" which
chronicles the controversies around the scrolls'
discovery and "Sacred Origens of Profound Things"),
I've found that a lot of religious
division/segregation is over property, power, money,
and manipulation of the masses. As I become more and
more agnostic, I put more faith in concrete things
like the Bible, the Koran, the life and teachings of
Buddha(who by the way never claimed to be a god or
demigod, just an enlightened man), the Koran, the Dead
Sea Scrolls, patterns of history, than anyone person's
subjective(and/or even extremely bigoted) view of religion.:)
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Sat Apr 01 2000 - 10:11:38 EST