West, my point is that experience is subjective. It may be that the "merchandise" of religion is experience, just as when a person pays for a holiday they are buying an experience. If the person says "prove to me that i will enjoy my holiday" about all the travel agent can do is show the person that others have enjoyed the holiday and if they like such things then it's likely they will enjoy it too, but it still doesn't prove anything.

If you say prove to me that what your religion says is true, it might be a similar prospect, you may only realise its truth if you experience it... eg if you asked Buddha to prove to you that the state of nirvana exists, he would likely tell you to go sit under that tree and meditate for ten years. That may be the only proof there is. When you say "prove to me that souls exist and God exists", the answer of a theistic religion is okay follow this doctrine as outlined in this holy book and you will come to know your soul and come to know God or be in His presence or some such thing.

It might be all bunk and just a political method of controlling man "the animal", however you cannot really know this unless you travel the road yourself, even in spite of the history and the violence that obfuscate the matter. It is how religion is and perhaps always has been and possibly always will be. It's why faith enters in.
And if it is all a lie, and we do only exist in a physical monism, as objects of chance and natural selection, what matter is it to spend your one insignificant life chasing fantasies of immortality and gods?

Donnie you are assuming people who are not superstitious are created out of a vacume. I personally have explored Christianity and Budhism and spiritualism and I can saftely say the travel agent is not selling holidays but selling slavery.

I will place Budhism aside because at some level there is an admittance that emotional/soul/spiritual existence is self delusion and the phantasmagoria is a neurotically constructed crutch to bolster what the individual wants to percieve. I have deep criticism of budhism as it is occult atheism.

Monotheism and spiritualism is fairyworld stuff , belonging more to Hansel and Gretel and less with spiritual reflexivity.

I can only conclude god belief/spirituality /religion is a form of compulsive obsessive disorder. That 'Islamists' and the 'Christian Right' and 'Budhist fundamentalists' and most likely communists and white supremists are merely hysterical or chronic developments of that illness.

People should be able to worship what they want, smoke, abuse the television ,shoot up on what they want whatever in the privacy of their own home as per John Stuart Mills. Its when Christians are interferring with childrens beliefs , systems of governance , Islamists putting down women and blowing people up or smokers blowing smoke in pedestrians faces, robbing pharmacists then we have a problem with the activity.

What Jesus said ,what mohommed said, what a person convinces himself of, whatever the hit is no excuse for interferring with 'others'. Also if religion is a mental illness then help should be avaliable as is rehabilitation avaliable for other syndromes.

Oliver,

You place excessive weight on the influence of gnosticism and the mystery religions on Christianity and appear to come to the erroneous conlcusion that Christianity is effectively a mystery religion.
You seem to be ignoring the historical evidence, starting with Pauls writing, that the Christians firmly rejected gnosticism and the mystery cults. Through various councils, credal formulations and the canon of scripture orthodox Christianity defined itself over against the mysteries.
You are perhaps falling into the trap of taking superficial similiarities and mistaking them for identifying characteristics.
In Christianity salvation was never achieved by the acquisition of secret knowledge as in the mystery cults. Salvation in Christianity is Gods grace extended to all not just to the elevated few.
Sorry to pop your balloon but your persistent reference to random mystery religions and the odd heretic do not form any cogent criticism of Christianity.
By all means challenge the Church and Christians to formulate coherent arguments but you would best do so by making your own arguments clear and base them on sound evidence-based historical criticism rather than random allusions to irrelevant religious cults without explanation of your supposed connections.
What are you saying anyway?
Christianity is just another gnostic mystery cult? That is just not supported by the historical evidence.

Waterboy,

Thanks for your reply. I will go though it again more carefully. In the interim, I would suggest that the gnostics mainly belong to a period perhaps two hundred years after the death of Jesus. In general, when writing to this Forum my references have been Gibbon, Toynbee, Wells, McNeill, Mack, Armstrong and Fox.

Paul was not a historian. He was a Hellenising a denomination out of the early Jesus cults. Successful cults become closed and develop credes, compared to cults [hear I not talking the weirdo cult stuff, but the evolutionary process described by Sociologists].

Albeit, perhaps, the churches have glued the cult onto some unspectiing, itinerant preacher? My read on Jesus is he said love each other, acknowledge the secular but in the long run The Spirit prevails [render unto Caesar...].

The conflict between Gnostic cults and the insitutionalising Christian cults cum religion by then, is around c. 250-325. Isis (Mary), the Serapis godhead, Mithras and others, were independent influences in the period. As Wells states, Alexandra of Jesus' time was a "God factory" and Jesus [if he existed] grew-up in historicall a Greek provincial city. Eygptian [afterlife] influence was strong in the times Julius, Augustus and Tiberius. [Just ask Elizabeth Taylor
;-]

West,
"I personally have explored Christianity and Budhism and spiritualism and I can saftely say the travel agent is not selling holidays but selling slavery"
Exercising freedom of choice and freedom of religion and being free to do so. Those religions generally do not demand extreme investment, nor do they impose great hardship on an individual. Hardly slavery.

"I can only conclude god belief/spirituality /religion is a form of compulsive obsessive disorder"
Your conclusion of OCD is based on your presumption of the truth of physical monism. As i've said in a previous post this is begging the question, circular reasoning, ie: there is no spiritual existance, therefore believing in such is a mental illness of the brain, and because it is a mental illness - there is no spiritual existance.

"if religion is a mental illness then help should be avaliable "
The only thing that should be available to a person with religious beliefs, is the right and freedom to choose to follow or not to follow whichever religion they like. It is not a mental disorder to believe in something. The common nature of mental disorders is that they reduce quality and enjoyment of life. You certainly cannot argue that of religious beliefs.

"...no excuse for interferring with 'others'..."
What I think you are really protesting is violent intervention and authoritarianism. I have no quarrel with you here, they are dispicable means of control that serve only to harm the unwilling recipient. But you err in associating these practices wholly and only with religion. Religious groups have been guilty of these methods in the past and in some places in the present, but it is not universal nor inherent to the field of religion.
Criminal practices in the name of religion are dealt with by the law against the individual or individuals involved, not by blaming the whole religion or religions in general. That is punishing the many for the actions of the few, which is both horrendous and irrational.

Donnie bottom line. Are claims of god/soul/ghosts/monsters/magic/werewolves/curses /afterlife based on factual knowledge or not?

To claim the supernatural without the facts in the first place means that such claims are meaningless as the source of information can only be made up.

God is made redundant by the claim of god.

Obviously the belief in god is a symptom of a much deeper problem.