Religion in 200 years will be mostly wiped out as people become more educated-

Fundies will be the last assholes around not "moderates" that only follow the happy parts of their holy book. Take a look at creationists here in America for example. No matter what the evidence, they are whacked in the fucking head.

Fundies are the die hards that will hang on-

Change is meaningless

Yours may be the single most ironic reply in the history of the internet.

Educated people are not necessarily less religious, by the way. Maybe you would know that if you yourself were more educated on this subject.

there's a very direct correlation between education and religion. More education, less religion. And fewer rabbits feet, too.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/10/07/when-people-go-to-school-more-they-go-to-church-less/

don't you?

Kinda works against your thesis . . .

do not negate the statistics.
Intelligent, educated people can be religious, but as a whole, the more educated, the less religious.
That's just the facts. What you extrapolate from it is a thesis.
What is yours about this?

Google him.

that's a sample size that doesn't even qualify as a sample.

Today. That is not the case and you have many DUers who are a variety of believers. Of course this group as a whole is criticized on a progressive site which is rather incredible. Equality for all?

K&R

Throw off the shackles and refuse to 'work within the system'.

People don't need sacred papers or magic clothes or magic words to be kind toward one another.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]A 90% chance of rain means the same as a 10% chance:
It might rain and it might not.[/center][/font][hr]

Fine, go ahead. Doesn't mean everyone has to.

I'm sick of bullying religious assholes shoving their idiocy down our throats and asserting their religion in the public sphere. Scalia is a prime example. Women shouldn't have equal rights or autonomy over their bodies just because that fucker believes in inane Bronze Age mythology about a zombie carpenter?

SOME religious people are assholes, by your reasoning ALL religious people should be required to remain silent about their faith.

Nope, doesn't scan. Because otherwise we'd be without Jimmy Carter, Martin Luther King, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Mahatma Gandhi, Oscar Romero (to name just a few)....and Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Sayathri, all of whom have been infused by their faith to do great things.

but she's from one of those brown countries so she just needs to be rescued from her culture before she can have an opinion, poor brainwashed thing

Religions are for beliefs for which there is no evidence.

They all deserve every lasting piece of ridicule they get.

Nice.

belief system based on mythology makes any sense.

is such a crock of mythology, isn't it.

Why bring all these silly stories into it and insist they are true, when it is patently obvious they were made up by humans living multi-hundreds of years ago. Stories of supernatual beings such as a magical dead guy who comes back to life, angels & demons, a fiery pit where "bad" people burn for all eternity, a human being a prophet of some omnipotent ruler of the universe -- they're all obviously silly manmade stories, and yet these stories have been used to subject and oppress people for eons and are used to this day (see the fight for gay marriage led by people who believe that a book of mythology from ancient Judea is literally true, or the power wielded by celibate males in lavish robes who testify in front of Congress that women shouldn't be allowed access to birth control, and on and on and on).

are all we hear about. Most Protestant and Catholics don't try to shove religion down our throats, so we never hear about them. They are pretty liberal in the sense that they believe in science, not creationism, or a 6000 year old earth. They don't believe the bible in a literal sense and concentrate on the new testament, ie: WWJD? They are more on the side of tolerance and social justice, but we don't hear about them, all we hear are the wingnuts espousing their beliefs and trying to convert those of us who are going to hell. If there are Protestants and Catholics who disagree with doctrine or dogma, they just quietly resist those things they don't agree with, ie: Catholics and birth control, or Protestants and abortion. They don't tell us that it's their way or no way.

that what are clearly parables are inviolable truth.

Some religious people believe that--we call them Fundamentalists. The rest of us, not so much.

Religions may espouse human morality as a good thing, but they are not the source.

If religions espouse anything good, then they're not religious.

But religious stories have been used (for better or worse) as a communication medium to leverage human morality.

That teachings is not simply saying 'be good to others' it is stating that the way we treat others is our announcement to the world as to how we ourselves would like to be treated. So a person who is oppressing women and beating the shit out of gay people is telling us he'd like to be oppressed and beaten. Other teachings from the same source say that the things we do return to us in time. So, the teachings say 'when you kick someone, you are asking to be kicked and the things we do to others return to us in time so if you don't want to be kicked, stop kicking people.'
In no way do such teachings command that we allow others to kick us uncontested.

rights leader which included all people. and that's what he is famous for.

"what is the difference between the two? How does one determine when a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law.

. . .

If I lived in a Communist country today where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I believe I would openly advocate disobeying these anti-religious laws."

Letter from Birmingham Jail

who are more about their religion .

good people who do good things based on their religion ARE NOT religious.

Ah okay, got it.

I just got out of an argument with a Sam Harris fan who's totally of the opinion that religion is evil.

Each time I try to understand how, as a non religious person, can know who's got the right interpretation of a religious book, the baddest the religious is, the more true to his religion is. The more good the religious person is, the less true to his or her religion he or she/he is.

This logic is totally dangerous and it's from ¨rational¨ people.

I've found no way to make them understand that they might be wrong.


www.deadheadcomicks.com

It doesn't mean the people practicing them are.

Religious people who do bad things are both religious and bad people. Religious people who do good things are both religious and good.

However, both still believe in nonsense. But we'll ignore that part of it, because I wouldn't want to be an angry athest asking offensive questions about rules and books written hundreds of years ago that make literally no sense, that people now use to hurt my life and other good people.

So instead, we'll focus on morals. I am firmly of the belief that religious people who do good things do them in spite of their religion, not because of their religion. While they may say that they do good because of what God or some other deity said they should, I have always felt that these people didn't help because they were told to by a religion.

When you hear someone who helps others talk, you can hear it in their voice and in their words. They understand a moral code that is common to all decent humanity, not just religion. They managed to get past all of the pitfalls of religion, managed to escape the thought processes forced by religion, and understand that life is precious and we should take care of it and ourselves. They may relate this to others in a framework that is based on religion because that's what they were taught and that's what they understand, but you can hear it in their voice. People who truly care about others show it.

I would like to make clear that I am not in any way saying that religion was what gave them the ability or the desire to help others. No, they were taught to love and help others. It may have come along with a strong dose of invisible sky wizard indoctrination, but the key parts, love and kindness, were there. The best of people can shine through the mucky outer layer of religion, but most can't. Their best doesn't shine as much as it could have, but they're good, bad, average people. They could reach higher and do more without religion. The worst understand religion, but not the love and kindness part. Those are the people to be afraid of, the fundamentalists.

Well, I got kinda busy at work before coming back to this, and I've completely lost my train of thought before I could write more and edit. Oops. I'll leave this, I guess. Hopefully it made some sense without a second draft.

As all belief is personal, it's not your words, it's your action. All I hear out of 'religious' people is a bunch of blah blah blah.

Religion is overrated IMO, and most people use religion as a means to pass their agenda, or hurt others.

Gandhi.

It's true, they did have a religious agenda.

Religion didn't make them great. If religion had that effect we'd have a plethora of great people.

It's an insult to Malcolm X, M L King, and Gandhi to imply they wouldn't have been great if it weren't for their respective cults.

I can't agree with this more.

He was a practicing Baptist minister. He started an organization called . . . wait for it . . . The Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

He writes in "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," "I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their 'thus saith the Lord' far beyond the boundaries of their home towns: and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of of the Greco-Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom far beyond my own hometown. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid."

and that his religiosity defined his message.

way to deal with the injustices that religion perpetrate is to eradicate it all together. And that just simply isn't necessary or even possible.

and I'm saying this as someone who is non-religious.

Religion needs to be eradicated from laws and governing policies, however. It shouldn't be tax-free. It shouldn't be above criticism.

We'd be better off as a society, a nation, and a world if these achievable steps were taken.

you should abandon your religion because there is no logical reason to believe and no evidence to support it.

How about Scientology?

Are all religions equal?

If they don't then there is due process.

After that it's all subjective.

The religions you respect and the ones I respect might be different.

But as long as people go about their business following the law I don't care what they believe.

It's a constant battle keeping the would-be theocrats at bay where I live, they infest the school board and other local government and they are as relentless as an avalanche.

6,000 years old.

I respect his right to do so. And his right, under the 1st Amendment, to posit any asinine, wrongheaded idea about reality that he wants.

I do not, however, "respect" his belief. He's wrong, he's a fucking moron, and he's leading far too may people down the primorose path of shitty logic and critical thinking skills, precisely at a time when our planet needs all the science-minded brains it has got.

Respect his flat-out, stupid-ass wrongness? Because it's his religious belief? No sale.

I was hoping people would take the context of the OP into consideration when reading my post, you silly!

Well said.

it is on the non fundamentalist adherents of those religions to not give cover to extremists. I mean ALL religions and extremists are to be found in all stripes Personally, I have no use for religion and stopped practicing decades ago because I could clearly see the rot at the core.

It was Muslim belief that got her shot. It's Muslim belief that was trying to prevent her from going to school.

I think she's an exceptionally brave young woman, but I don't understand why she continues to be a member of a religion that has expressed such hate and violence toward her.

Sid

Sid

It's like living with your OCD instead of treating it.

like? Does it take courage to sit behind a religion and punish others with a lash?