Oh yeah. I also forgot:
- nutty little rituals like sitting in dimly-lit rooms under curly light bulbs thinking you're saving the world.

My favourite is the dishwashing machine setting "eco", which means that your dishes come out dirty. Real self-flagellation stuff.

yuyutsu - Fortunately I have no idea what you are talking about. Is this a heresy on my behalf?

If you can be more explicit about what particular part of my rant you mean, I'd be happy to elaborate. That said, heresy is an intensely personal event. Quite obviously footbrawlers will regard anything remotely critical of their religion a hanging offence, big-business will regard anything that degrades their great god money as worthy of the severe castigation, islamics clearly take umbrage to any suggestion that the prophet is not the be all to end all, and catholics get their knickers in a knot if someone criticizes the pontiff. Personally I don't regard any of the aforementioned as warranting as much as a slap on the wrist but YMMV

You are right Praxidice. Everyone has their own set of 'rules' for life, whether they be religious or not.
For this reason, Australia is thankfully one country that embraces all these differences and is a secular society.

As far as Christians or Muslims go, I often wonder how humans ever managed in those sin-filled days before Jesus or Mahommed ever supposedly walked the face of the earth?

How did the human race survive without the Bible or the Koran?
There must have been rampant terrible sins raging through the communities, surely?

Maybe humans got on with their lives by simply using common sense and decency?
Sounds like our secular society today really?

Of course, the nice thing about the bounds of social conformity is that usually nobody tries to kill you when you overstep them. So this is progress, innit?

Suseonline

Religion has been part of human civilization for yonks, certainly well before christianity (2000y/o), or for that matter the Mosaic franchises (judaism & islam) which date from about 2000bc plus or minus. All ostensibly civilized populations had at least one, and often multiple religions. Not only the egyptians but all the tribes encountered by the israelites during their wanderings through the middle-east had their own gods & associated religions. In roughly the same timeframe, the various south american civilizations had another different set & whilst I've never researched ancient history of the far east, the chinese would probably have had an advanced society by the time of Moses with confucious, buddha & no doubt a whole tribe of gods on the scene. Then there was another mob of gods that didn't seem to get off the indian sub-continent, and pele who apparently had some way of travelling around the pacific islands. Somewhat later we had the greeks & the romans worshiping a veritable tribe of gods. Interestingly, the civilizations generally considered to be the most highly developed also had the most highly developed religions, eg china, india, greece, rome. Whether or not 21st century western civilizations have really advanced with consumerism, politically-correct-ism, sport-ism, child-worship-ism is another subject again.

Jardine K Jardine,

"But you don't only assume that, you assume that the State morally superior, that has superior knowledge about what people's values should be,.."

That is a completely straw man argument, where did I say that, in fact my argument is quite the opposite, since the state is product of society. I don't know whose political philosophy you are criticising, it certainly isn't mine.

You haven't described the anarchist paradise that will replace the current coercive state apparatus.