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Religion used to be inseparable from tribe and nation and economy and the well-being of the people. It was all one. The leader kept the people safe from harm by performing the correct rituals, following the right taboos, always, always with the goal that those he led would be safe, healthy, well-fed, and hopefully joyous in their lot.
If the people were stricken by plague, famine, or any other sort of catastrophe injurious to their well-being, the leader was obviously out of favor with the forces of the universe, The Powers That Be, and needed to be replaced. Usually this was done by killing him. Reading his entrails would then give important signs for the future.
Why wouldn't you have faith in such a system? There was total accountability.
We don't have that anymore. Maybe because it didn't always work. Maybe because leaders decided that to get one mythical being to die in their place for all time and all failures was a much better business plan. All the ethics of religion today are simply another way of trying to achieve the goal without remembering the goal: the well-being of the people. All the laws of the nation are the same thing. The goal is no longer the well-being of the people. (I'm damned if I know what it is.) And there are certainly no longer any consequences to failing to achieve such a goal.
A state religion now is merely a way of suppressing dissent with the current misguided systems. "You'll get pie in the sky when you die. Now be quiet and accept your lot in life and praise God who will reward you for your obedience."
There is no accountability for any religious or political leadership. Look at the Catholic Church which won't let gays marry consenting adults but will let them molest defenseless children. Look at George Bush who has never once done a single even tiny little thing FOR the American people. All his loyalty is to multinational anti-democratic corporations with no loyalty to the American people, values, or constitution.
Surely, when religion began, the death and economic chaos and environmental pollution brought by George, so vividly harmful to this people, would have had certain sure consequences. But George is comfortable in his belief that God has sent him to tell us what to do, no matter how it harms us. And why shouldn't he be? Nothing will ever harm HIM.
But that's just us. Maybe George's faith-based egomaniacal view of Christianity is just an historical aberration. Are the people of any nation with a state religion thriving?
Our current ethics are bandaids for wounds we don't understand. Religious or any other ethics: what's the goal of them? You nitpick and argue over thou shalt not kill while millions die slowly in numbed despair.
In which case, what is the point of individual ethics? What is the goal of them? To ensure a seat at the right hand of God? Or to ensure the well-being of the people? When I and television were young, I saw a tv interview in black and white. Some people where standing with an old man and an interviewer and an interpreter. The people were Jews who had been hidden by the old man, a Polish farmer, during the war. The interviewer asked, thru the interpreter, why the old man had risked his life to help strangers. The old man replied, thru the interpreter, "I had to. I'm a Catholic."
Throw away all your big words and your commandmants and all the rest. That old man got it right. With torture and death on every side, with centuries of bigotry throughout his nation, he still got it right. The first three words were everything. The last ones could have been anything: "I had to. I'm a Rastafarian." "I had to. I'm a Protestant." "I had to. I'm a Muslim." "I had to. I'm a Republican."
We are all in this together. Believing that one group can thrive only by ensuring the misery of another group is the way of the Holocaust, and so many other evils practiced today.
Religion has never really had a problem with killing. The commandment in question was only against murder, for one thing. And justifiable homicides were given shelter cities to flee to. The iffy question gets back to what ensures the well-being of the people.
And what do we do with leadership that doesn't consider that an issue.
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