The Axonist wrote:If 100 million people would go kill people because it is there belief does not make it right. Majority does not always make the right choice and how do we know that religion is the right answer. If religion turns out not to be real and just some false explaination for what happens when you die doesn't that create false hope for people? If people would believe that religion does not exist then they would have no motive to be a good person. Is religion really just a form of propaganda for people to do be kind to others?
kickycan wrote:
A message repeated over and over to a young impressionable mind is going to get in there, and it's going to get stuck deep. And in the case of christianity, you are taught to never question it, because that would be a sin.
If christians were never meant to question it wouldn't that mean that there is something hidden that was not meant to be discovered.
In this last sentence is the crux of the matter impying a taboo inculcated in us against discovering our true nature. This is the subject of Alan Watt's book, "The Book: on the Taboo against knowing who you are."
Religion, as spoon-fed in the churches has lost its mystery and meaning, and that's why for so many people it plays no part in their lives. I was reared with no religion whatsoever and after many years on a spiritual quest have found peace, but my spirituality has no relation to the supernatural gunk presented in the churches. My religion has everything to do with nature because, when all is said and done, what else is there?
Alan Watts once made the statement, "Christians didn't know what to do with Christ, so they kicked him upstairs." This means that Christianity went supernatural at some point and alienated itself from nature, i.e., instead of arising from nature it imposed itself on nature from above, a move that was wont to produce what we have now, believers and non-believers with no room for truth-seeking.
There is a story on this subject related by Joseph Campbell in his book, "The Power of Myth." It's about the Grail King. "The Grail represents the fulfillment of the highest spiritual potentialities of the human consciousness." Joseph Campbell says,
"The Grail King, for example, was a lovely young man, but he had not earned the position of Grail King. He rode forth from his castle with the war cry "Amor!" Wel, that's proper for youth, but it doesn't belong to the guardianship of the Grail. And as he's riding forth, a Muslim, a pagan knight, comes out of the woods. They both level their lances at each other, and they drive at each other. The lance of the Grail King kills the pagan, but the pagan's lance castrates the Grail King.
What that means is that the Christian separation of matter and spirit, of the dynamism of life and the realm of the spirit, of natural grace and supernatural grace, has really castrated nature. And the European mind, the European life, has been, as it were, emasculated by this separation. The true spirituality, which would have ome from the union of matter and spirit, has been killed. And then what did the pagan represent? He was a person from the suburbs of Eden. He was regarded as a nature man, and on the head of his lance was written the word "Grail." That is to say, nature intends the Grail. Spiritual life is the bouquet, the perfume, the flowering and fulfilment of a human life, not a supernatural virtue imposed on it.
And so the impulses of nature are what give authenticity to life, not the rules coming from a supernatural authority—that's the sense of the Grail."
) I think his argument has bite - but for the astute observer - the careful measurer - the proper believer - this argument can be dissolved through careful analysis of the experiences had by the experiencer. 
) serve as useful models to investigate.
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