Religion is Evil

[Grm]

Religion is Evil
by
Josh Becker

I've just read the second article in two days about Mel Gibson's upcoming, self-financed film about the death of Jesus, "The Passion," and the controversy it's already causing before almost anyone has seen it. I just want to add in my two-cents' worth before I've seen it, either.
In point of fact, I don't give a good Goddamn about Gibson's movie or Mel Gibson, for that matter. I think he's a third-rate director and a second-rate actor who's never had the ability to master his American accent, and sounds like he comes from America's 51st state -- the state of anemia.
As these articles keep pointing out, Mel is part of a religious sect called "Catholic Traditionalists," who didn't even have a church in Los Angeles, so Mel went and built one. These nuts only perform their services in Latin, and have broken from the Roman Catholic Church over the Vatican's 1965 accord wherein they finally exonerated the Jews for the death of Jesus. But Mel's not willing to go there. He and the other Traditionalists obviously still harbor a grudge that the Jews were culpable for the death of Jesus.
Perhaps if the Jews actually ran Israel at the time of Jesus' death they would have been responsible, but of course they didn't. The Romans ran Israel and most of the world at that time and it was their rules everyone was following. Which isn't to say that the Jews themselves might not have executed Jesus for being a rabble-rouser, but they certainly wouldn't have crucified him -- that's a Roman tradition, and the Romans were rather traditionalists in their own way.
You know what? Who gives a flying fuck? Hello! This was 2,000 years ago.
But all of this meaningless hoopla just brings up other issues for me. First of all, Jim Caviezel plays Jesus in "The Passion." One more time a gutless motherfucker has cast a gentile as a Jew. Doesn't this offend anyone else but me? Jesus was Jewish. He was born a Jew, raised a Jew, and died a Jew, and all in the land of the Jews, Israel. His parents were Jews, all of the apostles were Jews, everyone he knew was Jewish, and if he returned today he wouldn't go to church he'd go to synagogue. The fact that over a billion Christians get down on their knees and pray to a dead Jew has always amused and fascinated me from the time I was a little kid.
But I'm going to take this whole issue one big step farther. Religion, of any denomination, sect or ilk, is the basis of nearly all that's evil on our lovely planet. Religion is not here to make anything better, it's only purpose to divide and separate us. We're the chosen people, you're not. Our God is the real God, yours is false and profane. Although we must show love and compassion for other members of our own religion, those of any other can be killed, tortured, and maimed because they're infidels. Religion, at its very heart, means I'm right and you're wrong, or you're right and I'm wrong, but someone's always got to be wrong.
I say that religion is the pretext for evil on our planet. Religion is the method whereby humans can rationalize their awful behavior to other humans and pawn it off as good deeds.

The basis of all Judeo-Christian religions, which includes Islam, is the old testament bible, which states very clearly "Thou Shalt Not Kill." Although I didn't know it at the time, nor is it even my title, the name of my first film is really much more appropriate: "Thou Shalt Not Kill . . . Except." As George Carlin so aptly put it, except "if you believe in another invisible man than I do." In which case the root and basis of all these religions, the ten commandments, can be happily and easily be tossed out.
Evil does not run around in a red devil suit with horns. Evil runs around as fundamentalists of every kind, Christian, Jew, Muslim or Hindu. I'll leave out the Buddhists and the Quakers because I don't think they have ever bothered anybody. But they certainly aren't joining in with the rest of us, either. Religion is about separation, me and you, them and us, it has nothing to do with living with the rest of humanity in peace. Therefore, religion is the basis of evil.
Catholic priests have been seducing and raping young boys for over a hundred years, but are adamantly against homosexuality. Muslims say they believe in the ten commandments and that Abraham, Isaac, and Moses were all holy men, but all Muslims believe in the jihad and that anyone who is not a Muslim ought to be, and eventually will be, killed. Fundamentalist Christians, who also purport to believe in the ten commandments, really believe that when the apocalypse comes and Jesus returns, all the Jews will either have to convert to Christianity or will be killed, and that's perfectly okay. Of course, Jesus will be in the nearest synagogue praying to Yaweh while this mass murder is going on. And the Jews and Hindus all believe that they are the real chosen people and everyone is just screwed anyway.
This is all moronic, simple-minded, idiotic, pre-civilized, childish thinking. Any name that we knuckleheaded humans can give to this incredible animating power that we call God, be it Jehovah, Jesus, Krishna, Allah, Buddha, or Zoroaster, are all ridiculous bullshit.
As Joseph Campbell, the great historian of mythology, so clearly pointed out, anyone that takes any of these old books of mythology literally has completely missed the point. The bibles old and new, the Koran, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Book of Zoroaster, and all the rest of the "holy" books are merely collections of mythology. They are metaphors and parables about how to live your life and how to face death. They are highly imperfect users manuals on how to get through this veil of tears we call life. If you actually believe that Jehovah is an old (white) man with a long beard who is watching each and every one of us over six billion humans and judging us, you're an imbecile. If you literally believe that Jesus is Jehovah's son, you've decided to turn off a big portion of your brain and not deal with reality. If you literally believe that if you kill an infidel that Allah will bless you with seventy-two virgins in the land of milk and honey, you've definitely got a screw loose. These are all myths. Period.
Yes, there probably were guys named Jesus, Mohammed, and Buddha, but they were humans just like the rest of us. The fact that a lot of other desperate, unquestioning people gathered to them doesn't make them anything other than plain old humans.

Religion is all based on weakness and laziness. It's the throwing in of the towel on the mysteries of life. It's saying, I can't make head or tail out of any of this shit, so I'll just go with what everyone is doing. If they're all getting down on their knees, eating a cookie and believing it's the body of Christ, then I will too. If they're all wrapping themselves in leather thongs, covering their heads with beanies, and rocking back and forth, that's what I'll do. If everybody else is bowing to Mecca six times a day, I guess that's what I must do, too. This is the behavior of lemmings following other lemmings off the edge of the cliff. There is absolutely no difference between praying to Jesus, praying to Jehovah, bowing to Mecca, or lighting incense to Krishna, than there is sieg heiling to Hitler, blindly following Pol Pot into the killing fields, or chopping up Tutsis with machetes. It's all called thoughtless behavior.
It's part of our job as humans to think about and consider our place here on the planet and our position amongst all these other people. The second you abnegate this responsibility, you've fallen into an evil trap. As the writer Harlan Ellison has said, "We're all the same person under different skins," and that's truly a holy thought. All the religions on Earth want to point out is that we are all different, and we of our religion are better than those other unholy blasphemers. That's evil. And that is what all religion at its core is all about. Us and them. We're holy, they're infidels.
A word religions seem to really like, particularly the Jews is "tradition," which is the handing down of beliefs or customs from one generation to the next. This is another form of acceptance without questioning. For several hundred years an American tradition was, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian." A good old Australian tradition was "the Abo-hunt," where they tracked down and shot the Aboriginal people for amusement. A good old European tradition was the pogrom, where, if your luck had turned sour, go kill some Jews. The Russians loved this tradition, but the French and Germans thought it was a pretty swell tradition, too. And it's always been a tradition of the Serbs to hate the Croats, the Hutus to hate the Tutsis, whites to hate blacks, Christians to hate Jews, Jews to hate the Palestinians, Hindus to hate the Muslims, and Muslims to hate everybody.
Well, let's just thank God for tradition, sing songs in its praise and dance the Hora.
Karl Marx said that "Religion is the opiate of the masses," and he couldn't have been more correct. Religion is a drug that encourages you to not think for yourself, and, in my very humble opinion, is much worse and far more deadly than heroin, pot, cocaine, and alcohol all put together. None of these other drugs breeds contempt for other people, but all religions do in one way or another. Religion is the insidious evil of our planet, and the sooner people start to wake up to that the sooner we can get on to bigger, more important issues like peace and goodwill toward others.

Nah, religion isn't the cause of evil in the world. The evil lies deep in the human heart. Religion is just the excuse. The following is a nice sumation of the real problem.


"Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations."

Rebecca West

[Buzzzkill]

Nah, religion has got to be a cause. I doubt anyone would end thier own life kamakazaing skyscrapers if they didn't have a firm belief that they were about to be eternially rewarded, and would Jews and Muslims be exchanging atrocities if there were no Holy Land to vie for? Now, atheists and secularists have done some pretty horrible things as well; but on the whole they don't kill quite as much, don't block science, don't make kinky sex a criminal act, commit genocide, or fuck with our rights like the religious assholes do.

[Lupo]

Originally Posted by cleanfun4all

Nah, religion isn't the cause of evil in the world. The evil lies deep in the human heart.

I agree completely. Religion is not the cause. Just a tool for some. Humans are to blame and humans have always killed eachother. Religion or no religion. Whoever thinks that this fact will change if we lived in a world without religion, has to be extremly naive.

Originally Posted by cleanfun4all

Nah, religion isn't the cause of evil in the world. The evil lies deep in the human heart. Religion is just the excuse. The following is a nice sumation of the real problem.


"Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations."

Rebecca West

omg, youre such a fucking idiot

Originally Posted by persiangurl

omg, youre such a fucking idiot

Sorry sweetie, you're a troll and I don't waste my time with trolls. Insult me all you want, I have now replied for the last time.

[somedude]

If persiangurl is a troll, she's one hell of a hot troll!!! Now on the subject of riligion being evil, it's not all evil. But there are some really evil fuckers involved in a lot of them. I know, I was in a religious cult for almost a year when I was a kid.
I'm not joking and no sympathy posts please. Religion is commonly missused by corrupt people for their own ends, wether it is for power, money or other things. Seen it up close and personal. It's about the people, not the religion!

Originally Posted by somedude

If persiangurl is a troll, she's one hell of a hot troll!!!

The definition of a troll, as I used the word.


In Internet terminology, a troll is a person who posts rude or offensive messages on the Internet, such as in online discussion forums, to disrupt discussion or to upset its participants. "Troll" can also mean the message itself or be a verb meaning to post such messages. "Trolling" is also commonly used to describe the activity.

[MarcEdeSade]

Originally Posted by persiangurl

omg, youre such a fucking idiot

You REALLY need a man to slap you around, doncha?

[gal4]

Originally Posted by MarcEdeSade

You REALLY need a man to slap you around, doncha?

My hero! leave a gash mark right here buddy, it is so much for fashionable.

fashion

Originally Posted by MarcEdeSade

You REALLY need a man to slap you around, doncha?

only if u wanna be slapped back right in the nuts dear

[Grm]

OMG , Gal and PG! Bloody hell man, if these wildcats team up I fear for your balls.
hiding under the covers
Grm

[Grm]

Originally Posted by cleanfun4all

Nah, religion isn't the cause of evil in the world. The evil lies deep in the human heart. Religion is just the excuse. The following is a nice sumation of the real problem.


"Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations."

Rebecca West

I think what ms west is saying, is that we all have a choice, either our bad side or our good. But personal resposibility is more often subject to our upbringing and the society we live in. Organised religious groups have an inordinate influence on their adherents.In almost every war that has ever been faught, each side was convinced that 'god' was on their side. Through the centuries millions have perished in the name of religion and sadly still continue to do so.
Humanist
Grm

[gal4]

I'm an atheist, Thank God!
--G.B. Shaw.

Originally Posted by Grm

I think what ms west is saying, is that we all have a choice, either our bad side or our good. But personal resposibility is more often subject to our upbringing and the society we live in. Organised religious groups have an inordinate influence on their adherents.In almost every war that has ever been faught, each side was convinced that 'god' was on their side. Through the centuries millions have perished in the name of religion and sadly still continue to do so.
Humanist
Grm

First, I'm not religious at all, but it can be argued that the world would actually be a far worse place were it not for the civilizing influence of religion.

You are right about the inordinatate influence that organized religion has on it's followers, but here's the thing, God didn't create organized religion, people did. In the absence of religion based on the invisible man in the sky, it is not at all difficult for a leader to turn himself into a god of sorts and the state as the church. Think Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union under Stalin. How many millions died because of those "religions?"

[gal4]

Ecclesiastes Ch7:29.

29 See, this alone I found, that God made human beings straightforward, but they have devised many schemes.

[Grm]

Originally Posted by cleanfun4all

First, I'm not religious at all, but it can be argued that the world would actually be a far worse place were it not for the civilizing influence of religion.

You are right about the inordinatate influence that organized religion has on it's followers, but here's the thing, God didn't create organized religion, people did. In the absence of religion based on the invisible man in the sky, it is not at all difficult for a leader to turn himself into a god of sorts and the state as the church. Think Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union under Stalin. How many millions died because of those "religions?"

All religions have a hierarchy of, surprise, surprise, men. It is all about power, power over women, power over the people. Man had to invent religion to explain his inpending death, this is the central theme of all religions. What is the most powerfull concept? Power over peoples thought.If you can control peoples thought, you have ultimate control over their actions. Luckily for the planet its not only religion that has a 'civilising influence', its mostly peoples 'good side' that keeps most of us from hurting others. Stalin was an exponent of communism, which is a sort of religion, as it seeks to control peoples thought. Both Stalin and Hitler had to break the churchs' power, so they could take it for themselves.
Humanist
Grm

[gal4]

It is wonderful that everyone thinks they have found the truth.
And reason and rational thinking will lead to salvation of man, his soul and society.

Koan

[Omegaphallic]

Originally Posted by Grm

All religions have a hierarchy of, surprise, surprise, men. It is all about power, power over women, power over the people. Man had to invent religion to explain his inpending death, this is the central theme of all religions. What is the most powerfull concept? Power over peoples thought.If you can control peoples thought, you have ultimate control over their actions. Luckily for the planet its not only religion that has a 'civilising influence', its mostly peoples 'good side' that keeps most of us from hurting others. Stalin was an exponent of communism, which is a sort of religion, as it seeks to control peoples thought. Both Stalin and Hitler had to break the churchs' power, so they could take it for themselves.
Humanist
Grm

Bullshit, their are religions like Wicca lead by women and even in religions were the official positions of authority are run by men, like the Catholic Church, there are women in positions of power and influence like the Abottesses and Sunday school teachers. And even men in Authority are forced to listen when enough women speak. We live in a gynocentric culture, just because most official positions of Authority are held by men.

[shysnale]

Originally Posted by Grm

Religion is Evil
by
Josh Becker

I've just read the second article in two days about Mel Gibson's upcoming, self-financed film about the death of Jesus, "The Passion," and the controversy it's already causing before almost anyone has seen it. I just want to add in my two-cents' worth before I've seen it, either.
In point of fact, I don't give a good Goddamn about Gibson's movie or Mel Gibson, for that matter. I think he's a third-rate director and a second-rate actor who's never had the ability to master his American accent, and sounds like he comes from America's 51st state -- the state of anemia.
As these articles keep pointing out, Mel is part of a religious sect called "Catholic Traditionalists," who didn't even have a church in Los Angeles, so Mel went and built one. These nuts only perform their services in Latin, and have broken from the Roman Catholic Church over the Vatican's 1965 accord wherein they finally exonerated the Jews for the death of Jesus. But Mel's not willing to go there. He and the other Traditionalists obviously still harbor a grudge that the Jews were culpable for the death of Jesus.
Perhaps if the Jews actually ran Israel at the time of Jesus' death they would have been responsible, but of course they didn't. The Romans ran Israel and most of the world at that time and it was their rules everyone was following. Which isn't to say that the Jews themselves might not have executed Jesus for being a rabble-rouser, but they certainly wouldn't have crucified him -- that's a Roman tradition, and the Romans were rather traditionalists in their own way.
You know what? Who gives a flying fuck? Hello! This was 2,000 years ago.
But all of this meaningless hoopla just brings up other issues for me. First of all, Jim Caviezel plays Jesus in "The Passion." One more time a gutless motherfucker has cast a gentile as a Jew. Doesn't this offend anyone else but me? Jesus was Jewish. He was born a Jew, raised a Jew, and died a Jew, and all in the land of the Jews, Israel. His parents were Jews, all of the apostles were Jews, everyone he knew was Jewish, and if he returned today he wouldn't go to church he'd go to synagogue. The fact that over a billion Christians get down on their knees and pray to a dead Jew has always amused and fascinated me from the time I was a little kid.
But I'm going to take this whole issue one big step farther. Religion, of any denomination, sect or ilk, is the basis of nearly all that's evil on our lovely planet. Religion is not here to make anything better, it's only purpose to divide and separate us. We're the chosen people, you're not. Our God is the real God, yours is false and profane. Although we must show love and compassion for other members of our own religion, those of any other can be killed, tortured, and maimed because they're infidels. Religion, at its very heart, means I'm right and you're wrong, or you're right and I'm wrong, but someone's always got to be wrong.
I say that religion is the pretext for evil on our planet. Religion is the method whereby humans can rationalize their awful behavior to other humans and pawn it off as good deeds.

The basis of all Judeo-Christian religions, which includes Islam, is the old testament bible, which states very clearly "Thou Shalt Not Kill." Although I didn't know it at the time, nor is it even my title, the name of my first film is really much more appropriate: "Thou Shalt Not Kill . . . Except." As George Carlin so aptly put it, except "if you believe in another invisible man than I do." In which case the root and basis of all these religions, the ten commandments, can be happily and easily be tossed out.
Evil does not run around in a red devil suit with horns. Evil runs around as fundamentalists of every kind, Christian, Jew, Muslim or Hindu. I'll leave out the Buddhists and the Quakers because I don't think they have ever bothered anybody. But they certainly aren't joining in with the rest of us, either. Religion is about separation, me and you, them and us, it has nothing to do with living with the rest of humanity in peace. Therefore, religion is the basis of evil.
Catholic priests have been seducing and raping young boys for over a hundred years, but are adamantly against homosexuality. Muslims say they believe in the ten commandments and that Abraham, Isaac, and Moses were all holy men, but all Muslims believe in the jihad and that anyone who is not a Muslim ought to be, and eventually will be, killed. Fundamentalist Christians, who also purport to believe in the ten commandments, really believe that when the apocalypse comes and Jesus returns, all the Jews will either have to convert to Christianity or will be killed, and that's perfectly okay. Of course, Jesus will be in the nearest synagogue praying to Yaweh while this mass murder is going on. And the Jews and Hindus all believe that they are the real chosen people and everyone is just screwed anyway.
This is all moronic, simple-minded, idiotic, pre-civilized, childish thinking. Any name that we knuckleheaded humans can give to this incredible animating power that we call God, be it Jehovah, Jesus, Krishna, Allah, Buddha, or Zoroaster, are all ridiculous bullshit.
As Joseph Campbell, the great historian of mythology, so clearly pointed out, anyone that takes any of these old books of mythology literally has completely missed the point. The bibles old and new, the Koran, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Book of Zoroaster, and all the rest of the "holy" books are merely collections of mythology. They are metaphors and parables about how to live your life and how to face death. They are highly imperfect users manuals on how to get through this veil of tears we call life. If you actually believe that Jehovah is an old (white) man with a long beard who is watching each and every one of us over six billion humans and judging us, you're an imbecile. If you literally believe that Jesus is Jehovah's son, you've decided to turn off a big portion of your brain and not deal with reality. If you literally believe that if you kill an infidel that Allah will bless you with seventy-two virgins in the land of milk and honey, you've definitely got a screw loose. These are all myths. Period.
Yes, there probably were guys named Jesus, Mohammed, and Buddha, but they were humans just like the rest of us. The fact that a lot of other desperate, unquestioning people gathered to them doesn't make them anything other than plain old humans.

Religion is all based on weakness and laziness. It's the throwing in of the towel on the mysteries of life. It's saying, I can't make head or tail out of any of this shit, so I'll just go with what everyone is doing. If they're all getting down on their knees, eating a cookie and believing it's the body of Christ, then I will too. If they're all wrapping themselves in leather thongs, covering their heads with beanies, and rocking back and forth, that's what I'll do. If everybody else is bowing to Mecca six times a day, I guess that's what I must do, too. This is the behavior of lemmings following other lemmings off the edge of the cliff. There is absolutely no difference between praying to Jesus, praying to Jehovah, bowing to Mecca, or lighting incense to Krishna, than there is sieg heiling to Hitler, blindly following Pol Pot into the killing fields, or chopping up Tutsis with machetes. It's all called thoughtless behavior.
It's part of our job as humans to think about and consider our place here on the planet and our position amongst all these other people. The second you abnegate this responsibility, you've fallen into an evil trap. As the writer Harlan Ellison has said, "We're all the same person under different skins," and that's truly a holy thought. All the religions on Earth want to point out is that we are all different, and we of our religion are better than those other unholy blasphemers. That's evil. And that is what all religion at its core is all about. Us and them. We're holy, they're infidels.
A word religions seem to really like, particularly the Jews is "tradition," which is the handing down of beliefs or customs from one generation to the next. This is another form of acceptance without questioning. For several hundred years an American tradition was, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian." A good old Australian tradition was "the Abo-hunt," where they tracked down and shot the Aboriginal people for amusement. A good old European tradition was the pogrom, where, if your luck had turned sour, go kill some Jews. The Russians loved this tradition, but the French and Germans thought it was a pretty swell tradition, too. And it's always been a tradition of the Serbs to hate the Croats, the Hutus to hate the Tutsis, whites to hate blacks, Christians to hate Jews, Jews to hate the Palestinians, Hindus to hate the Muslims, and Muslims to hate everybody.
Well, let's just thank God for tradition, sing songs in its praise and dance the Hora.
Karl Marx said that "Religion is the opiate of the masses," and he couldn't have been more correct. Religion is a drug that encourages you to not think for yourself, and, in my very humble opinion, is much worse and far more deadly than heroin, pot, cocaine, and alcohol all put together. None of these other drugs breeds contempt for other people, but all religions do in one way or another. Religion is the insidious evil of our planet, and the sooner people start to wake up to that the sooner we can get on to bigger, more important issues like peace and goodwill toward others.

As long as we are individuals and no cheeps, we're always going on having understandings problems with the religious writings. If you take time to read the New Testament without thinking about the heavy history behind it, you will find a lot of parable showing up the 'interdependence' between the human being and the nature. That is the basis of any spiritual practice. Practicing the view of interdependence helps people forget about every 'ego based' kind of evil. (Selfishness, pride, jealousy, etc...). This IF properly done doesn't tend to push people in just ONE way of thinking and acting. As far as we're individuals, we can't apply in real life exactly what we read in a book. We all need a spiritual guide (Priest, Imam, etc..) to help us 'adapt' the religious teachings in order to work on our personal weaknesses instead of working on the most common weaknesses. The brain-dead people you describe in your post are the victims of a non personal communal teaching. Do you really think religion leads to passivity and weakness ? Look at the Shoaling Monks. Look at the Templar. Who are they ? They are basically armed monks. If you’re in a situation where the only way to defend the people you love is to kill, then killing is not a sin. That is not only for Christian’s but also in Buddhism, Islam, and Hindu. The real religious goal is merely to cope with the complexity of day to day problems. The thing is that people experiencing great pain need desperately to believe in something simple and straight. Simplicity helps to clarify the mind and to reassure those who are in great misery. They would 'grab' anything that gives them some kind of a 'reassuring structure'. History, facts, scandals, movies, all that tend to add some sort of a emotional & cultural varnish to religion. Religion is not about thinking of some historical incoherence (Abraham was there before Mohamed, etc..) We don’t care about showing up cultural paradox as long as spirituality is there. As well as Jesus created a new religion from his Jewish root, Buddha created a new spirituality from his Hindu root, etc...History, books, movies, and all kind of facts aren't important in understanding the basis of spirituality. Forget about all that, forget about the freaks, take the bible, and read the New Testament. As you know there are 'live' day to day face to face situations between Jesus and the Jerusalem people, without any history to interpret besides. Remember Jesus was just a walking guy whose acts were related later by the Saints. It is human nature to gossip on things and to add artificial stuff on them. If you have such a mental block about the Christians, have a look on Buddhism. I personally am a Buddhist since 2001 and have notices a lot of changes in my life. The funny thing is that I used to share the same anger you have for religion. I am not saying I am a saint, (otherwise I wouldn’t be hanging here), I don’t care if there’s a god watching me everyday, I don’t care if there’s Heaven and Hell, I just care about living a better life right now and become a better person in day to day life, right here right now in the year 2006. That is the only thing religion should push you toward. Don't stay in your position. Give yourself another chance to change your mind about it. If the Bible seems too straight to you at this point of your thinking, try Buddhism with that book : 'The Heart Of The Buddha's Teaching' by Thich Nath Hanh. (6$ - http://cgi.ebay.com/The-Heart-of-the...QQcmdZViewItem) It is a "modern" way of explaining religion and spiritual practice. No heavy history there, no ‘one way’ thinking, and no Mel Gibson.