[user104658]

Originally Posted by the truth

I 100% disagree entirely. The word of Christ is all that matters. The fact a bunch of empire building mass murdering monarchies who carried out mass murder, torture, starvation, death camps, rapists and psychos use and pervert and corrupted everything, including their version fo patriotism, they perverted versions of religion, just as they corrupt the concept of democracy , science , sociology and many other facets of society ...doesn't make these subjects any less valid. Should we scrap science because of the atomic bomb? should we scrap democracy because democratic nations allowed evil scum like stalin, hitler , Mussolini to rise to power? no. we work with what weve got.....we learn from the mistakes, we try to capture the evil doers and punish them and we attempt to rewards the just, the smart and the hard working....does life always work out perfectly ? no. but that doesn't mean you throw out the baby with the bathwater and certainly not throw out the timeless lessons of Christ

I'm not saying there aren't good messages in the bible or lesons to be learned; in fact, I said in my original post that the (truly) Christians friends that I do have are goodhearted, charitable people who I would say are clearly "better" for their faith. Not only that, I envy them that faith. It centres them, it grounds them, they have a sort of stability and an an immunity to chaos that I would love to experience.

However, I understand too much about the history and politics of organised religion to ever find that. It holds and teaches some wonderful lessons but it doesn't and never has made any sort of reasonable sense. It's a nice dream, in a world of countless nice dreams, but the truth is, it takes either indocrination from birth or traumatic experience to reach that level of belief. I didn't have the former, and I truly hope to never experience the latter.