Religion is an attempt to gain a sense of assurance that there is some meaning and purpose to life. Living in an unsure universe scares the shit out of most people, but I think, "Wow!, look at the enormous mystery of it all and the wonderful possibilities that entails."

Beliefs aren't factual or rational, not based on a reality we can know. They may be true, but that is subjective and often personal. If beliefs were factual then they wouldn't be beliefs, they would be facts, and therefore, knowledge. You wouldn't have to believe anything - there would be proof. Beliefs are defined as taking some unproven data as if they are facts, but that is a lie because they can't be verified or proven. It doesn't matter whether they might be proven factual sometime in the future. You can't know that until it happens. Without proof or disproof, there can't be knowledge. Facts can be verified by anyone, anywhere, anytime, using the same also verifiable methods, and get the same result time after time. Beliefs don't pass this test. So to believe is to live in delusion, illusion and only by opinion and superstition. The world runs on belief systems; that is the problem. Of course, beliefs can't be disproved, either. The solution: don't believe anything! Only rely on facts. You may speculate, hold opinions, generate hypotheses, but hold them lightly, always ready to change when new data presents itself. Ask yourself why you want to believe anything.

Belief is so powerful that believers want to believe that their beliefs are factual. It's a psychological need - they identify with their beliefs - they are their beliefs, so to call them into question is perceived as a personal attack.

We can't trust belief.

Doubt and skepticism are your best friends and have a long religious tradition going back thousands of years. That process of questioning has caused many religious transformations.

The worst fear of believers is that nagging worry that what they believe may not be true, and if not the consequences are unthinkable. It's too fearful to contemplate and must be repressed and all activity focused into promoting their belief, trying to make it true. But humans are constituted such that represed fear and anger will out in very dysfunctional ways.

Much of the cultural beliefs that we are taught from early childhood are entirely unconscious, even the teaching of them, these attitudes are transmitted without thought because they are so thoroughly ingrained.

You have been brainwashed by religion, government, corporations to feed their agendas at your expense.

Why must you believe in political ideologies and religions and support those principles of belief, rather than just discover and apply what works? The support and application of political and religious positions/views leads to dysfunctional policies, social disasters. All you need do is read history to see the failed attempts to follow beliefs. Yet we do it again and again. Is this sane behavior? Are you sane? Rational? I think the most godlike part of you is the rational mind. Why don't you use it? If you reject your rational mind, then you reject your humanity.

Some people have negative knowledge - they think they know something, but they are wrong. That puts them in a hole - first they must unlearn falsehoods before they can learn.

A lot of guilt is false guilt engendered and imposed by authorities to keep you under control for their benefit. We are socialized with guilt to make us obedient. To be free, throw off guilt. And if you have good reason to be guilty, that you have harmed someone, make amends, seek forgiveness, forgive yourself, then get on with your life. Guilt shouldn't be a permanent condition; it only holds you back.

Absolutist belief systems are sick because the world isn't absolute.

People who see things in black and white do so because their choices are limited.

Ideology be damned. It is dogma and doctrine, fixed and immutable, and impossible for it to take into account all that life may offer up. Humans are too varied and flexible to be constrained by a few rules, but that's why people create ideologies, to try to simplify and make life predictable.

All religions are beliefs, and sometimes they are defective. After all, religion is a social construct that runs on restrictive doctrine and dogma, seldom on spirit. Religion is the corruption of spirituality. Religion should open us to more life, rather than constricting it.

When religions are founded the followers think that they have the final answer, but the creating spirit moves on - there is no final answer.

Religions are primarily social, political and ideological, and will always be bones of contention that will be used politically for power and to divide people. Religions are collective spiritual paths, but they are someone elses' spiritual path.

The current cultural war between the ideal of the secular society and the religious one is of modernism and the scientific viewpoint against a medieval world view. Fundamentalists hold a medieval view. They don't understand the 2000 year philosophical advance of reason and science that even the Catholic church accepted. They accept technology, but not the philosophy that makes it possible.

Progress is the American secular religion, but it is ill-defined, leading us to we know not where. We can't know if we are socially or spiritually progressing or regressing.

We can't end all corruption because humans are untrustworthy, corrupt and liars. But we are complicit in corruption when we ignore it and allow it to continue. We know that it occurs right under our noses and almost out in the open, yet we do nothing about it, even when we know that it hurts us directly.

If we legalize sex, drugs, abortion and freedom the religious are so afraid that the fire of Sodom will rain down upon us in an all-consuming apocalypse, but I can assure you that nothing bad will happen. Their's is a hellish delusion born of evil. It is time to step out of the fire and misery that fear and hatred have made of life and into joy.

Sacrifice is giving up something valuable, even one's life, to produce or protect something of higher value. But to "sacrifice" others, humans or animals against their consent, is ritual murder. This is the destruction of values.

Christianity was corrupt within the first century, beginning with Paul, and has continued to be corrupted for 2000 years. It hardly resembles what Christ taught. This happens with all religions, and Christianity is no exception. A good example is the concept of the rapture - a nineteenth century heresy based on an obscure personal interpretation of a dubious and complex mathematical manipulation of data from Revelation. It is a popular modern fundamentalist fantasy. Revelation was an individual and personal vision, and no one can offer a definitive interpretation of its meaning.

Christians think they have the TRUTH, but truth is a slippery and elusive thing open to interpretation. They confuse truth with facts and they don't have the facts to support their views.

Christianity and other modern religions tend to ration the spirit, limiting it in their and others lives; that's why they have so much fear, envy, hatred and dogmatism - they are restricted and inflexible. These people need a major psychic and spiritual enema to relieve their spiritual constipation.

You don't need religious authorities to tell you what the spirit wants or to intercede between you and it - this is a violation of all spiritual teaching from all religions. Most religious leaders are bureaucrats, not spirit guided. Nor do you need Bibles, Korans or other religious books to guide you. Those are of the dead past. Spirit is here and now. Yes, some people are called by spirit to serve and teach, but that doesn't give them spiritual authority over you. Theirs may be a personal vision that can't apply to you. Seek your own vision and relationship with spirit, as all great spiritual masters have taught.

We might be better off if all the religious books in the world were obliterated, then we would have to rely on spirit in the here and now.

You should want to slap upside the head, until their brains rattle or fall out, all those false moralists who want to stop you from living your life as you see fit, having fun, etc. Just because they are uncomfortable with a behavior doesn't mean they have a right to stop it and control your life. These are people who hate and fear freedom and life. Why do you let them do it?

There ought to be a special place reserved in Hell for those Christians who have done horrible deeds in Jesus' name.

Science has shown us a far more magnificent conception of existence than has any religious imagination.

The popular hypothesis of Intelligent Design demonstrates that the religionists have already lost the battle with evolutionists because they have had to incorporate some of evolutionary science into their thinking. Creationism, the hypothesis preceding ID, has been refuted as a psuedoscientific facade hiding the belief in a one time, exclusive creation. There might be some merit in ID, but the way it is presented and defended still smacks of religion and belief, not science. However, an ID hypothesis that encompases evolution cannot be ruled out by science at this time.

As is the case with most traditional Christians, they must be pulled kicking and screaming into social justice. Everything they have opposed is now an accepted part of Christian doctrine. It will be the same with gay rights and marriage, and perhaps drug use, abortion, cloning and euthanasia. They refuse to see that social justice, whether secular or religious, still comes from a spiritual impulse and so they must lose the battle every time. Shouldn't religion be the leader of social justice? And why isn't it? Because it is institutionalized ideology and traditionalist politics, not led by spirit.

Christian and Islamic fundamentalists really aren't fundamental, but literalists and moralists. They don't want to go to the roots of spirit, which is the definition of fundamentalism, but to follow a rigid doctrine and dogma of biblical inerrancy. A dead text and its interpretations by ministers dictates their lives, not spirit. The same can be said for all other religious fundamentalists. They have a fixed, inflexible ideology, not a spiritual path. These people are not only enemies of American ideals, but enemies of humanity and spirit. Their ideology is dangerous to human health and freedom. These are sick people, spiritually and morally, probably psychologically. They are obsessed with sex, drugs, homosexuality and non-traditional lifestyles. It's the negative, their opposition to new ideas, that drives and defines them, not the divine. They're really anti-Christian.

The only valid fundamentalism lies in reconnecting with the Earth and the divine feminine and realizing that we are a part of all life, not separate from it. We have been out of balance for so long that we don't realize it.

Christians who believe in biblical inerrancy live with so many contradictions that their brain circuits are shorted out.

The Ayatollahs Osama bin Fallwell and Osama bin Robertson and their ilk - Sheldon, Wildmon, - belong with the Taliban and other religious fanatics. These are evil men who must pretend to be good to pull the wool over our eyes, but their cloak is wearing thin. Mostly, they hate and preach hatred and fear, hellfire and brimstone - their form of home grown, spiritual terrorism. They certainly don't believe in freedom or human rights.

Fundamentalist Christians generally won't notice, but the rhetoric used by their ministers often has a strident emotional tenor. It's stressed and stressful to listen to. Their smugness and arrogance is distasteful. Where is their humility? What does this demonstrate about their psychology? That they don't have a sense of being saved or secure and so must push thier beliefs on others.

Fundamentalist Christianity is about social and political control. Women and children must be subordinate to the father and the patriarch and family subordinate to the religious leaders, dictated by doctrine or the interpretation of such by the leaders. This organization belies that Christianity is a religion of freedom.

Many fundamentalist Christians operate from repressed anger and fear. That's why they avoid what they think is evil and demonize and scapegoate people who disagree with them. That creates even more anger and fear. These repressed emotions are created in early childhood by traditional harsh and unforgiving child raising practices - child abuse - not sparing the rod, denying pleasures, the bullshit view of an evil universe allied against them, denial of the rational mind and the importance of secular knowledge. This emotional state is the basis of fascism and it prevents them from thinking in any other way and from being free in their hearts and minds. They are easily manipulated by their leaders use of emotional rhetoric.

The New Testament supplanted the Old, but modern fundamentalists largely follow the Old.

Fundamentalist and conservative Christians are often rabid supporters of capitalism in contradiction to Christian teaching. A Christian society would be nearer to socialism and communism than capitalism because it teaches sharing, charity, cooperation, loving and doing good works without thought of personal gain.

Those Christians who teach that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and want to bring it back to that are either very ignorant or liars. They are anti-American. America was a product of the Enlightenment, that secular humanistic philosophy that provided an underpinning for freedom and individual rights. Our nation was founded by Christians and other spiritual people who understood that they couldn't agree on religious matters and had seen the effects of government sponsored religious persecutions in Europe, so they proposed religious freedom for everyone. This means that you have the right to believe, practice and express your religion, even to proselytize for it, but you can't force it on others, especially by using government. Forcing religion on others is an immoral act. Spirituality cannot be coerced. Government must remain religiously neutral; it cannot favor one against another, but must protect your right to your religion. If government is allowed to express one religious view, then it must also provide for public expression of all other religious views. This is patently unworkable and a violation of the Constitution. This secular view protects society from the predations of corrupt religions.

At the time our country was founded most of the populace who considered themselves Christian were nearer to what we would call Unitarians today. There was very little fundamentalism as we know it.

To set up a secular state and society was a spiritual impulse. The founding fathers were a mix of enlightenment Christians, Deists and agnostics who knew that religious and spiritual freedom was a way to potentially become more spiritual by removing political control from religion.

Have you ever asked yourself what would happen if fundamentalist Christians were to implement their view of government? Our government would quickly become a fascist state, with a secret police, censorship, loyalty oaths, purges, concentration camps; death penalty for homosexuals, sex offenders, believers of other religions and non-believers. The economy would suffer horribly and the quality of life in general would be degraded. Much of scientific and philosophical research would be curtailed or forbidden. Many of these Christians don't want all of these things to happen, but when any fanatical sect takes power, human nature dictates that severe abuses will happen. Fear and anger would reign. Trust and goodwill would die. Many people would die or suffer horrible tortures. It would be hell on earth. This has happened so many times that by now we ought to recognize the symptoms and look for a cure. Look within yourself to see if social programing and guilt makes you ignore the evil side of these so-called Christians. They can't be trusted to do good.

I'm often appalled at the sterility of American church architecture. Most Protestant sects eschew ornamentation as a relic of the puritan ethic that the building isn't important, only its function as a gathering place for the real church - the people, so they build utilitarian structures. I grew up Southern Baptist; I remember the building of the new church in the mid-1950s. It was much larger and had everything a church at that time could have wanted, but it was sterile and cold; it had nothing to inspire the mind/soul nor was there comfort for the body. There was little of that in the teaching or the congregation, either. Catholics, on the other hand, have a tradition of high ornamentation and great architecture; consider the design of great cathedrals or the many interesting chapels that inspire spiritual insight, devotion and comfort. The temples of other religions often have very rich architectures. The Bible states that the temples should be built as a "Glory to God", so that tradition mandated a beautiful building. Architectural sterility isn't proper to a place of worship. Perhaps it reflects the niggardly faith of its builders.

That the Pope is infallible goes against all core teachings from every spiritual tradition, even Christianity. The Pope is human, therefore imperfect and can't be made otherwise. This doctrine was instituted for political power, hardly a positive spiritual motivation. No other current religion has such a doctrine. We no longer believe in a doctrine of Divine Right, except some few far right wing conservatives.

That the Vatican is recognized as a sovereign state is offensive to me and probably to many non catholics. By what right should it be a sovereign state? It doesn't have citizens, unless Catholics worldwide can claim citizenship, and that would cause many conflicts. It doesn't belong to the United Nations and has not petitioned for membership. It is the governing body of a religious organization, but that doesn't qualify it for statehood.

If the Catholic Church hadn't existed the world would certainly be different, but perhaps not better or worse. For all the good the church has done it has been balanced by it's evil, so it's a 50 - 50 proposition.

Thou shalt not violate another consciousness. You need no other commandment than this.

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