Pied Piper - "I think the Khmer Rouge was a religious organisation (Belief in god is not essential) what is required, is blind faith in defiance of the evidence."

Thank you, Pied! I have been making that same point on this forum for over 3 years...that ALL forms of intense belief in an idea...a mental construct...specially when those beliefs may be unconfirmed, unverifiable or at least debatable in the light of actual experience...are essentially forms of religious fervour.

Religion does not have to be about God, the afterlife, or anything like that at all. It does not have be be connected with churches. It does have to be about a strong belief system, a set of values used to guide human conduct.

The God of any religion is the set of ideas around which the intense belief is built that causes people to adhere TO that religion and practice it.

Communism is a religion, built around holy books such as the Communist Manifesto, prophets such as Marx and Engels, and a congregation and worldly organization (the Communist Party). It ironically is a religion that supposedly officially opposes religion! LOL! They don't in the least grasp that they have simply launched a new and superficially different religion of their own...one that rejects the traditional "God". They made up a new God...a God of materialism.

The Khmer Rouge (or however the hell you spell it) were another such religion that supposedly did not believe in "religion".

Corporate Capitalist theory is another such religion. It worhips the idea of increasing $ profit and achieving an unending expansion of goods and services (a very foolish notion to pursue on a World of limited space and natural resources).

Pyschiatry is another such religion. It has its holy books, its prophets (such as Freud and Jung), its supposedly all-embracing answers to the problems of life...and its blind spots and limitations. Like all religions it may be right about some things...it may be entirely wrong about others. It will typically make the error of figuring that it is THE best way to deal with reality, an error made, seemingly, by all religions.

Every great human ideal belief system is a religion. God is not required at all in the equation. Every human belief system is based partly on observable facts, partly on experimentation with the theory, partly on opinions, partly on unconfirmed theories, partly on mere supposition, and partly on faith.

Man cannot escape being religious, because man thinks, man imagines, man hopes, man theorizes, man comes up with notions of "right" and "wrong", man makes errors in judgement.

Every atheist is religious. Just not about the traditional "God" of earlier cultures, that's all. He's religious about something else that HE considers important.

If Dawkins just gave the word "religion" a lot broader definition, he'd be correct in saying that it is the main thing that leads good people to do bad things. (grin) Good people do bad things basically because they are motivated by beliefs that may be out of sync with reality. They may either not be fully aware of what they are doing...or they're not strong enough to hold up under the pressure of the circumstance, in which case they fail to do what would be the better thing to do (and they know it).

Dawkins sees the flaws in traditional religions. Fine. He might better look to the flaws in ALL religions, including his own. If he's conscious at all, he has a religion of his own. Even my dog has a religion of his own, I can assure you. It's based partly on experience, partly on emotion, partly on faith.