commonsense 1 you ask

'if one was to 'join', which one would you.' I suggest you turn to the only One who can forgive your sin. I suggest you turn to the only One who pours out the rain on the righteous and unrighteous. I suggest you turn to the One who created the earth and all thats in it. I suggest you read the new testament and see that everything Jesus said has never been matched and is just as relevant today as always. I suggest you turn to the One who rose from the dead. Forget about all the others (they are phonies).

I think runner's latest rant above is exactly the kind of infantile nonsense described by Dawkins et al.

Oh to be so childishly credulous - it's a pity that so often they're childishly hateful as well.

Jesus was to my taste one of the greatest philosophers of all times, but he was leaving in a time of fear of God, a time when gods where a part of life and it was very unhealthy to doubt their existence. Religion must have been the best way to carry a message, (ad agencies where pretty shabby), temples where also used as market places(religion seems to have a close relationship with money). Jesus 's philosophy as the one of John Lennon or Socrates, preached Love, Respect and a permanent critic to greed, money, looks (in other words Capitali$m). I believe that he adjusted his message to what was available to his philosophy, which in this case was One god (make things a bit easier to deal with when you have to tell a story), he imaged his sayings by telling stories where he could get his listeners to question themselves on morality, ethics, love, greed (in a different manner than of Socrates but the aim remained the same). He was transmitting an imaged story, the old and new testaments are written for the large uneducated crowds, and it remains a story that is taught to the christian youth.
Mohamed with the coran also was a philosopher that adapted his toughts to what was available at his time to create a better living for his people Islam, to my understandings Islam gives directions to its followers in an "imaged" way, or via rules ( A very simple example is the sin of eating porc in the muslim world, it is just a health rule due to the worms or diseases that pigs carry especially in warmer climates) making it a deadly sin is a guarantee that no one will get sick from it.
Yes I think religions are childish, they teach thoughts that are pre-chewed instead of teaching the process of the thinking, and then they threaten you with punishment when you don't know the lesson.
Preach Love and Thinking my Brothers but watch for the greedys they are killers, remember Jesus , Socrates or Lennon.

Childish Gavroche

Certainly reading your childish rants CJ would give me no reason to change my mind. And to think you could of been brainwashing my kids at university. I am relieved you told me that you have retired!

Interesting how a small group seem to talk only to each other and with a vicious need to denigrate each other.

Very sophisticated and worthy reading. Not.

None of you on either side has seen the most obvious problem. If the West does move away from religion, which is indeed happening, I'm afraid the East is not. So the clash of cultures can only become more pronounced as the East clings to the variety of God's avaailable and the West moves towards worshipping one God, money.

Poverty must be eliminated to avoid the inevitable clash. Not greed, just poverty.

Not even the financial greed and destruction of many people's lives due to Bush's extravagance and ignorant avoidance of monitoring his fellow greedy breed will change the West's devotion to money first and foremost. Listen to your government. Everything is predicated on affordability. Or used to deny the public of service while wasteing it on themselves etc.

If lives aren't affordable they are disposed of by ignoring basic needs and services. Then no one can blame government can they? I point the finger.

It would be quite difficult from any perspective to see how the human race has advanced at all from it's earliest days of hiding in caves at night in fear. Back then, a valid fear.

But if anyone can distinguish the overall behaviour pattern today from way back then I'd ask you enlighten me.

It's still about what you have or have not got. There are exceptions of course but, like the movie "Idiocracy" the overwhelming numbers of the scared and uneducated slowly drag those who see ways to advance as humans back to base level.

Technology and scientifically of course there are big advances. I'm referring to man's basic behaviour. Unchanged. Darwin was right, survival of the fittest is the rule of life. Still.

RobbyH,

Monotheism is problematic, when we have more than one monothesistic player on the same field at the same time. And we do. There is no tolerance for there being two suns in the sky.

The Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, via pantheism and syncretism, were better placed at diluting inter-faith conflicts. Islam and Christianity (Neo-Judaism) by the definition of their posits must be in conflict.

The commonality between the three major monothesistic religions starts with the needs of Judaism, Christianity and Islam to leverage religiosity to manage a socio-political circumstance:

Judaism required archaism and futurism to sustain an occupied a Diasporian People (Toynbee). Christianity extrapolated the deeds of a medicant (Mack) whom is a claimant to the House of David (Theiring)and Islam the unification of the Arabs against the physical encouchment of Persia and the ideological encrouchment of Judeo-Christianity (Armstrong).

The goals of the puppetmasters cum contrivers would not have been childish; rather the retention of knowledge, most specifically, whom has the right to translate events for others, the enjoined to ignorance, fear and superstition of the masses. Herein, it is not merely the case of Religion being an opiate (Marx) but super-added the modivations of the opium pushers. Propagation is sustained familily, and societally reinforced; whilst, to the lay, the original needs for the said religious inventions are lost in time.

O.