//I don't believe this rubbish against God but you guys do!//

Or so you keep telling us. I note that you've still made no effort to provide any evidence or reasoning to back up that assertion.

Do you think perhaps that if you repeat the assertion often enough it will sow seeds of self-doubt in our mind, and we'll start to think that maybe we are actually Christian after all?

//I can't wait until he gets to Revelations.//

Might be a while. The lunatic seems intent on doing the whole damn book, verse by verse. Of course, everybody will have got bored and wandered off long before Revelations, and with nobody to feed him attention Op2 will also get bored and wander off. So I guess we'll never get hear his brilliant theological critique of the Revelation. What a pity.

To be honest Joe I have no idea why He hates the living God. What I do know is I have not the time to read the hundreds/thousands of texts he has cut and paste written by those hating the God they say they don't believe in.

I frankly think that OP2 is simply stirring to keep
this discussion going. We all know that true religion
is internal, not external and the spirit within us
cannot be blamed for the blasphemies carried out in its
name. What some have done in the name of religion,
projecting their neuroses, even perpetrating evil on
the world, does not make religion as a mystical
phenomenon invalid. In fact, nothing could be so relevant
or so necessary in the world today.

Organised religions have become, in many cases, as calcified
as other institutions that form the structure of our modern
world. Our religious institutions have far too often become
handmaidens of the status quo, while the genuine religious
experience is anything but that. Also religious institutions
as such are not the only arbiters of religious experience.
They do not own the Truth, for the Truth cannot be owned.
Nor should they think they hold some franchise on our
spiritual life. They are consultants and frameworks but they
are not God Himself. We should not confuse the path with the
destination.

It is simplistic to think that many people turned away from
organised religion and now are coming back as if that's
the whole story. People are returning to religion because
they found that life without the conscious awareness of
God is difficult, and they come back to religion because
that is theoretically where to find Him.

But they don't come back as the spiritually half-interested
complacent congregants that many of their parents were.
They've come back with an interest in actually having a
religious experience. Organised religions will have to
step up to bat, religiously, or it will wither away.
Organised religious institutions are in for a huge transformation,
for the simple reason that people have become religious in
spite of them.

Dearest Foxy,

Thank you for your excellent contribution, bravo!

It was sad that the SSM legislation favoured the calcified organised religions and only their official clergy were granted the legal ability to act according to their religion and conscience - what about the rest of us who actually are religious (or at least aspiring to be religious) and try to follow the spirit?

If a dogmatic socio-political institution has no religion left in it, then why should we continue to refer to it as "religious"?

Dear Yuyutsu,

You always seem to have the ability to cheer me up when
I most need it.

Thank You - you sweet man.

Dearest Foxy,

As always, I learn so much from your contributions, especially your positivity and determination to see the good side.

As an atheist, and probably in as much doubt as the next believer, I appreciate the struggling for what Kenan Malik calls 'a moral compass', a set of moral principles to live by. For me, Marxism used to be the 'answer', but that fell apart some time ago. A long time ago. But I always remember Bill Hayden's dictum, 'put more in than you take out of life' and I've tried to flesh that principle out as much as I can, give or take the odd backslide.

Yes, much of what we live by in a secular sense has its deep origins in Christianity and Ancient Greek philosophies, overlain by centuries of the development of ideas, science, 'knowledge'. As a Popperian now, I assume that pure, total knowledge is not possible, but we have to work with what is most workable. There IS reality, truth, even if we can't grasp it, and (Popper says) we never will. We should do the best we can in an imperfect, ever-unfinished world: a huge step forward is to concede that nobody has all the answers.

Thank you, Foxy and Love always,

Joe