[Syr]

Originally Posted by kenakari

I've met sheep/sleepers (those who are not conscious) who don't. My perception was that any formalized set of beliefs was faith, and faith=religion, even if it's just a congregation of one.

I disagree with you: you can have faith in yourself, your friends, prophets/gods or goals. In my opinion "faith" is the relation of trust/hope you have in whatever you believe in. Religion is the unnecessarry ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ who tries meddling with said relation(s).

If one has faith in, for example, Yeshua (Jesus), one can decide to belief in him outside of the church and bible. The first gospels were written quite some decennia after his death anyway, so probably more fiction/propaganda than fact. This guy died as an insurgent/traitor (if he'd been executed for blaspheming against the clergy/religion, like christianity likes to tell, he'd been stoned to death), so it requires some good propaganda to keep faith in such a criminal.

I think most of us have grown up in countries where certain religions dominated the history of that particular country and laid claim to (and twisted) pre-religious social traditions ("marriage" for example). The whole gay marriage thing wouldn't be such a problem if the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ bible (pun intended) was written by ancient greeks instead of ancient jews (unfortunatly this would not better the situation of women in said fairy tale collection) or religion kept it's filthy paws of marriage at all. No, I wouldn't mind the total destruction of religions.

Besides my above rant, I find the article sub-par as well compared to other articless. The header "Support your local pedophile" was especially poor. In fact (and I'm going off-topic here), I wish child-abusers were only pedophiles, it's pedosexuals I have a problem with. While the first is a sexual preferrence and doesn't have to be practised, the second is the actual activity which tends to destroy lifes (same applies to incest, most childrapes are in fact done by family-members). Religious tradition (based on shame and fear) hatches cultures in which sexual predators can work easier than in secular cultures, but religion doesn't necessarily create the predators.

On another note, I'm impressed this discussion is so mature, politics and religion are the subjects to start a flamewar.