what do u think

reddan1981 said:

its our psychology which differentiates those who would cause atrocity from those who couldn't. Religion is just one of many hierarchal systems to filter wealth from us. However religion is used as a pseudonym for paramilitary in most cases mostly by historical editors deliberately painting their own filtered interpretation of 'our' history.

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Johnny1120 said:

Religion started as an attempt to explain what we did not understand. The universe does not always make logical sense, and the human mind has a need to make sense of its environment, thus religion was born to explain that which is beyond us. Myths and stories were created to explain how nature works.

Then came organized religion. Organized religion preyed on this need and used it to control the masses. Charismatic leaders set down dogma and rules in the name of religion to dictate the actions and morality of their subjects using fear of some future punishment or promise of a future boon as a motivator. This proved to be extremely effective and the same pattern is followed to this day. People found it easier to be told how the world works instead of going out and discovering it for themselves. Humans have a tendency to follow the path of least resistance. Education was strictly controlled in order to assure that the only source of answers to the workings of the universe are in religious doctrine.

Religion will always be around because that NEED to understand is built into the human condition. Science will always be the enemy of religion because it competes with it to explain the universe, but it requires a level of effort most are not willing to expend.

Religion serves to comfort billions of people and in that respect it serves a valuable purpose. It is only when people use religion as a manipulative tool to accomplish their own ends that religion has a negative aspect. The fault is within ourselves, not with religion.

BTW, in the old testament there are a number of accounts where Jews killed every man, woman and child in entire cities because God told them to. The story of the Passover is (to my knowledge) the first recorded use of terrorism to accomplish a goal, ending with the deaths of many Egyptian children. Although this type of activity hasn't been practiced recently, I wouldn't exclude Jewish from the list of "convert or kill" when it comes to religion.

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reddan1981 said:

The etymology of “religion” is indeed disputed. This is not, of course, the case when it comes to English, which clearly inherited the word from Latin religio. Rather it applies to Latin itself, in which it is not clear what the component parts of the noun religio are or mean. The ancient Romans disagreed about this. Cicero, for example, thought that religio derived from the verb relegere in its sense of “to re-read or go over a text,” religion being a body of custom and law that demands study and transmission.

On the other hand, the Christian writer Lactantius, writing in the early fourth century, opted for religare, a verb meaning “to fasten or bind.” “We are,” he said in his book “ Divinae Institutiones ,” “tied to God and bound to him [ religati ] by the bond of piety, and it is from this, and not, as Cicero holds, from careful study [relegendo], that religion has received its name.” Lactantius’s greater contemporary, Augustine, preferred this etymology to Cicero’s while suggesting yet another possibility: re-eligere, “to choose again,” religion being the recovery of the link with God that sin has sundered.

It may be that Lactantius and Augustine rejected Cicero’s etymology because it made religio seem too close to such Jewish terms as torah, mishnah and talmud, all Hebrew words having to do with teaching and studying. Since unlike the practice of Judaism, the Christian religion, as they saw it, was a matter of binding faith and commitment rather than of accumulated knowledge, the religare etymology may have appealed to them for the opposite reason than that proposed by Rappaport: as a way of distancing Christianity from Jewish concepts rather than of adopting them.

In any case, however, the “binding” of tefillin on an observant Jew’s arm and the “binding” of Isaac in Abraham’s aborted sacrifice of his son on Mount Moriah have never been, to the best of my knowledge, closely associated with each other in Judaism. Nor do they share the same word. To put on tefillin in rabbinic Hebrew is, as Rappaport refers to it, le’haniah. tefillin, to “lay” them on one’s arm, a term that does not in itself imply submission to God’s will, although the biblical verb for the same act, kashar, “tie,” might seem more suggestive of this. The verb for what Abraham did to Isaac, on the other hand, is akad, which generally refers to the trussing of an animal prior to its being slaughtered, sheared, neutered, etc. Although the Akedah, as Isaac’s binding is known in Judaism, has always functioned there as a powerful symbol of the Jewish willingness to sacrifice all for God (as well as functioning in Christian theology as a prefiguration of the Crucifixion), it has never served as a symbol of the overall Jewish relationship to God, which was certainly not pictured as one of being trussed upon His altar.

To return to the word “religion,” it is a curious fact that, although all the ancestors of today’s Europeans had (like the ancestors of all the world’s inhabitants) what we would call religions, no ancient Indo-European language had a specific word for religion, Latin having been the first — which is why the great majority of modern European languages have some version of religio as their term for it. Probably this was because, precisely since religion was everywhere in the ancient world and no activity was divorced from it, it never struck anyone as a distinct aspect of life calling for a name of its own. There were names for specific gods, ceremonies, rituals, forms of worship, cults, sects, etc., because all these were discrete things; religion itself was the unnamed totality of them all, the forest that couldn’t be seen for all its trees.

It took the Romans, who in conquering the world were forced to become its first anthropologists, to realize that behind all this multifariousness was something about which it was possible to generalize. From its original meaning of “punctilious respect for the sacred,” religio came to denote any comprehensive human system of organizing and expressing such respect. Religio was, Cicero wrote, cultus deorum, “the worship of the gods.” Whether he was also right about where the word came from would appear to be anyone’s guess.
My point is, religion is just a word brother. It was always the RICH that organised the poor, history describes it as religion.

Isis is not religion. Its beginnings in 1950's by two businesses partners named Sheik Mahmoud Halabi and Ayatollah Khomeini.

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