so of course i chose religion...
any input is appreciated...
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A small ESSAY...We need to drop religion and go back to God.50% Voted for by dollar, raseyusmy, Dwn, bob2314, pnktrky.
God is not religion and religion is not God.
You must choose either one or the other...
Besides a CulT-ural tradition, religion is little more.
Theology is flawed as its full of human ideas and expectations.
You don't need human beings to tell you what to believe, start having faith in yourself for once.
People who submit to organized religious belief have lost faith in themselves and are loosing there God-given uniqueness by conforming over the beliefs of which only a few people had before the organization started.
Find God not their God.
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Religion, GodReligion is a set of laws that can be followed30% Voted for by WordsofHarmony, Dwn, bob2314.
and with laws there are lawbreakers
and the laws are shadows of the lawmakers out of fear
God is a spirit, and energy that is all around us.
We are apart of this spirit, and we are here to learn and progress
We may come back, we may not.
Spirituality is a way of life that is driven by personal happiness from inside a person.
Religion was meant to control. Spirituality is meant to guide -
In Defense of ReligionVoted for by Jackymania.
About your essay, .... it is short, very potent, and contemptuous. If there is a limitation of length for the essay, then you need to be congratulated for using as little words to strike down some notions ingrained in religious belief systems, and the politics of sustaining those systems employed by bigots and zealots.
An attempt is made by me to defend religion and the importance of its survival by an non-believer.
About Religion, ....... Religion is part of evolution. The human species have gone through relatively spontaneous, rapid and gradual changes in the time line seen in a historical perspective. The myriad thought processes and needs of society is evident and reflected through the way of life the given society and its vast majority of people adopts.
Religion is the culmination of such a psycho-social process. The codes or laws that it sets forth and pretends to uphold is under the noble virtue and want of holding the society together.
However loosing its fundamental principles or the soul essence of its messages, overtime, man - the upholders of religion became too materialistic discarding and continuously disregarding the spiritual and ethical nature of Religion which imposes a moral code of conduct - for the individual believer.
When a religion becomes organised, it brings power and authority along (natural social causation), for the needs of its maintenence and sustenance. Here lies the basis of corruption. Each so-called authorities and powers that be, as is the nature of human beings, brandishes and misuses their accumulated powers against their own community who had initially bestowed those encompassing definitive powers to represent them.
If Religion is all about corruption, than religion loses its sheen. It no longer can attract sane and intellectual beings that strives for peace in their own community and within themselves.
Thus, we see that it is peace - both within and outside, which is the raison d' etre of Religion. However, since you point out that it has become the basis of both corruption and wanton killings, the need is to remove these negatively influencing authorities and powers as bestowed supposedly by the will of the people. And not by rubbishing age old religions and social systems that it created.
My personal feeling is, that Religion has still a good role to play in promising stability and peace in human affairs. It still can serve as the only beckon of hope...... at least for a while more.
If your words are true to your belief - and at the same time the purported reason of scoring good marks for the essay is just an excuse - then your call to abandon Religion - in an revolutionary fashion, as it suggests may not be the right approach at this juncture of time.
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Religion AbandonReligion has become a breeding-ground of corruption. It is responsible for more deaths than cancer and leukemia combined. It also has helped fuel the flame of bigotry and discrimination for well over 2 millennia. For these three reasons, among others, we should abandon this crumbling institution and begin to form our own ideas rather than follow in the footsteps of our forefathers. Only by casting off the crutches of faith will we ever be able to function remotely closely to our full potential as human beings (Wales 1).Voted for by Crazyhead.
The use of religion for corrupt purposes has been around for almost as long as religion itself. Constantine changed the dates of numerous Christian holidays to coincide with pagan holidays in order to make both groups easier to conquer. Then there is the Catholic League, which in an effort to define what a “cult” is, to aid its followers in avoiding and destroying them, actually fit its own description of a cult. Blatant hypocrisy such as this has become one of the most common practices in religion. Nearly every religion has adopted this hypocritical, “love thine brother, but slit their throat if their theology isn’t straight,” mentality.
The death toll is even more staggering than the corruption. The crusades alone killed hundreds of thousands. As Saint Bernard of Clairvaux declared in launching the Second Crusade: "The Christian glories in the death of a pagan, because thereby Christ himself is glorified" (Haught 1). Not to mention the fighting that has been going on for numerous millennia between Judaism and, well, just about everyone. Suicide bombing, jihad, lynching, genocide, while religion did not necessarily begin these things it has undeniably perpetuated them. Hitler, for instance, thought he was doing “Christ’s work” (Wales 1). In 1209… soldiers reportedly asked [Pope Innocent III] how to distinguish the faithful from the infidel among the captives. He commanded: "Kill them all. God will know his own." Nearly 20,000 were slaughtered -- many first blinded, mutilated, dragged behind horses, or used for target practice (Haught 1). More people have died in the name of Jesus than have died from drug-use. We have, supposedly, made drugs illegal due to their negative effects, yet we allow much worse things to take place.
We pretend to be concerned for the families of addicts yet we turn a deaf ear when the addiction is to religion. When an alcoholic neglects his child we send CPS; when a fanatic neglects his homosexual child we do nothing. We have turned religion into a get-out-of-jail-free card for bigots, racists, and sexists when, in many cases, it is the reason for the bigotry in the first place. The Klu-Klux-Klan, neo-Nazi’s, and many other white-supremacy groups hide behind the veil of Christianity. What’s worse is that most people don’t have the intellectual capacity to realize that religion is nothing more than a manipulative tool that has been used since before recorded history to control them with fear.
And yet, these are the same religions that [people] say promote love, peace, goodwill, and all sorts of warm fuzzies. Clearly, they haven't yet acknowledged this schizoid aspect of their religions. They're in denial of the dark side of religious faith… how it is the greatest divisive force the earth has ever seen, rather than a unifying one. And this is why these people so casually dismiss all the genocide done in the name of God over the years (Wales 1). It is not at all possible for peace to co-exist with religion due to religions deep roots in corruption, violence, and intolerance. Some will say that religion brings people together, and that may hold true on a small scale, but this is not the case in any large society. We need to form our own ideas and opinions without the interference from some invisible, infallible, father figure, or any form of clergy. People die to change beliefs, but one can change an idea on a whim, and if we want to stop this senseless violence, we need to abandon all beliefs, so no one has to die to make change.
Works Cited
Foster, M. A. “The Church and the Crusaders” 9/2/2007. 9/5/2007
www.medievalcrusades.com
Haught, James A. “Religions Death Toll” 1990. Skepticism Inc. 9/5/2007
http://www.theskepticalreview.org/JAHPoliticsDeathToll.html
Wales, Vincent M. “Death Toll Poll”. Atheists Attic. 9/5/2007
http://www.bee.net/cardigan/attic/010104.htm
---. “Re: Well Said.” E-mail to John R. 06 sep. 2007
---. “crippled by faith.” < http://www.bee.net/cardigan/attic/100597.htm
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pnktrky
February 7
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God, not you have to believe in ppl who believe in God. this is the flaw of organized religion... that it gets into a mob mentality where nobody really knows what they believe. the religions know this and teach their young ones but they much rather be playing kick ball. so in the end the problem with organized religion is that although it is helpful not many truely believe but many truely want to believe.
Crazyhead
February 9
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ALL religion holds the same disgusting position in my mind...
christianity simply tends to be a much more explosive, and thus relevant, religion, which is why i used it...
i do not blame addiction on religion, i dont even know how you could have read that... i am saying religion IS an addiction of the same severety as... say... alchohol...
this essay is not meant to be acedemic so much as expose religion (which is generally considered a good thing) to be an enormous source of evil that i believe must be stopped at all costs...
thx for the criticism...
Jackymania
April 1
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