good points you guys


Religious freedom for some did mean that others must be punished if they dared disagree with the leaders freedom. Just like today when Plain pals talk about REAL Americans.

Religion is a knife all right, expcept for the music.
Religion often tends to life's tragic cuts as well as its joys. Living within a framework is a comfort to many. I too celebrate family holidays with a morality play at its foundation. It can be fun and people have an excuse to gather outside the home or market.

however
The God business always becomes intractibly evil in maintaining its own defense and power of long standing laws made by their leaders.

Here I would like to interject:
A law can only take away a natural right and freedom.
A law can not create freedom, it can not create inalienable rights, it can only modify our being.


for example I will cite Catholicism since they claim to have an infallible leader who has an I-phone app to talk to God...

The Pope still outlaws the use of condoms for AIDS infected men who want to have sex with uninfected girls or wives.
Go out and multiply AIDS.

What is the blessing there? Where is the humanity? Is God once again moving in a mysterius way? Is this what we are to expect from God's will? Is this just the sick evil trade off a Pope uses to maintain tradition?

The Pope chooses evil over a sensible decision because they have to maintain the myth of their own infallibility, with the threat of taking away the goodies that they promise by excommunication.
When excomunication was not enough they tortured and killed.

To be balanced I see a similar extremeism among fellow Jews who go around ranking who is a truer Jew or seeking vengengence above all other things in life. The more "reformed" the more rational Jews become, at least in my eyes. When they become reformed enough they become transmogrified athiests with the Jewish culture as an attitude, a knowledge and a wisdom celebrated among friends, family and the world.

People outside religion who merely usurp or pretend to be religious are nearly as evil. Like Madoff's tradeoff selling mostly to Jews or Jim Baker who ripped off Christians. Using religion as a political tool to fool a homogeneous group is so old I am frankly amazed that it is not worn out and that it works today as well as it did thousands of years ago.