Imagine if there was no religion

"Imagine there's no countries,
It isn't hard to do,
Nothing to kill or die for,
No religion too,
Imagine all the people
living life in peace..."....(2nd verse of the song "Imagine", by the late John Lennon. Entire lyrics are here if you're interested: http://www.merseyworld.com/imagine/lyrics/imagine.htm)

Nothing against sincerely religious people who quietly practice their faith, but when you really think about it, it's the sick religious fanatics who are the root of so very many of the world's problems wherever you go.

I think this Iraq war is getting to be just as much a religious war as it is a war for oil. Today on the news I heard our media claiming how it's the religious fanatics in Iraq who are disrupting the peace process over there. Well as much as that may be true, it's our own religious fanatical leaders from the great old U.S. of A. who are waging war against the Iraqi religious fanatics and anyone else, it seems, who might get in their way. America's religious fanatical dipshits vs religious fanatics from all over the world. Hallelujah!

Throughout history, it's quite possible that more people have been killed in the name of religion than for any other single cause. If not, it's gotta be close. It seems that it may never stop because there will always be an abundance of weak-minded people who feel the need to follow these religious zealots.

The countries that have tried to ban religion (Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China, North Korea, Albania under Hoxha, Romania under Ceausescu) have all, every one of them, substituted cults of personality.

killing people for any reason, including killing them for oil.

than those.

I think the idea is that religion should not be repressed by force, but that people on their own, need to recognize that a religion that promotes love as it's logo, is essentially, hypocritical, and it may be time to examine that.

6,000 years of war-greed and theology

raised catholic, judgemental and prissy,
born again savage in 1969. peaceful existance in harmony with nature and the universe. #1 rule: cause no harm.
imagine
peace out

they are essentially nothing as in all things in nature. There is a fear that leads to a belief that after death, actually, life lives on and they will actually live on forever.

Human beings have great difficulty in accepting that one day, they will die, and one day they will be a nothing. This cannot be imagined, so the belief in a hereafter, or a life after death, in some heaven or some hell, is necessary to the human psyche in order to not destroy the ego or the painful belief that upon death, they are simply a nothing.

but very difficult to preach

Refer to the Cultural Revolution in China, the brutal policies of Stalin, the regimes of Ceacescu and Hoxa for examples of men who denied religion but were still brutally repressive, always insisting that people conform to a book or set of written principles, whether they fit or not.

The problem isn't religion, per se, as even religions I see as greatly damaging to the human spirit have been sources of comfort in times of extreme stress. The problem, rather, is a mindset that demands human beings conform to a set of abstracts dreamed up by men and written down on paper.

Zealots come in all forms, and blame all sorts of philosophies for their inability to confront shades of grey and accept other human beings for who they are.

just require a spiritual rational for the horrors they perpetrate. "I can do all of this! (pick your perversion) and STILL go to (Heaven, Paradise, Valhalla, Nirvana, whatever)".

The Romans discovered that when they tried to wipe out the Christians and the Soviets found the same resistance when they tried to ban all religion as well.

What we need to do is start insisting on the separation of Church and State. No tax breaks for any ministry who inserts themselves into politics and hefty fines, even jail time, if they don't learn their lesson the first time.

If someone says "God bless you", it's usually one of the kindest, most heartfelt compliments you can get.

OTOH, when Bush says, "...and God Bless America" at the end of his speeches, it's the most repulsive thing I could hear. It's like he can justify killing hundreds of thousands of people just by saying that phrase. It's like an insult to real religion when he says it, and you just know he's smirking his ass off inside as he comes out with that phrase. I can't stomach that phoney bastard, and he used religion as one of his major tools of winning the election and promoting the war. Like a previous poster said, we really need to crack down on separation of church and state. This is rediculous.

state. No public official should mention gods or religious practices in public. Any religious ministry who can't stay out of politics needs to have their tax free status revoked. If they still don't get it then they need fines and maybe even jail time.IMHO.

It seems like supreme sacrilege, somehow. As much as I despise the works of Bush, and question his motives, I don't like to think he is anything but woefully misguided. It is beginning to feel heavier and darker to me than that. I'm starting to sense an epic struggle of forces I have no real language for.

as to how unbelievers are to be dealt with.

The educated and intelligent know this. The stupid blindly obey it.

fed up with organized religion because the church had its long fingers in everything. The church meddled in people's lives in a major way deciding who would serve in the army and who would get a university education, for instance. In essence the church was the government.

As we ricochet closer to the abolition of the separation of church and state, people here may get totally fed up as well. Now, the last thing a politician would ever mention is his personal faith...it would be the kiss of death.

We're pretty good at dividing ourselves up and fighting each other over many other lines as well.

The Romans, the Greeks, the Egyptians... shared the same universal fears and their gods, with different names, was the same. A Roman was able to pray in a Greek temple without any problem. And a day someone said he heard a god speaking to him and the real mess began