"Just look at the disgusting way the Greens are promoting their religion through the bushfire tragedies."

I have noticed how the tragedy has been leapt on by opportunists among 'em. Their argument is that we have damaged the environment in ways which made it easier for the arsonist's fire to spread.

However I have also noticed the comments about how their inroads into logging meant that the fire was worse than it could have been if the logging equipment was in reasonable proximity. I don't think they would like that observation.

stevenlmeyer wrote: "If mythmakers can transform a thuggish, sadistic and rather dim witted brute like Che into a revered legend in just four decades what can we really know about Jesus or Muhammad?"

I agree that Che was a thuggish, sadistic brute. However, he was highly intelligent. If one piles on the adjectives one should ensure their accuracy. On the occasion of 9/11 it was called a cowardly attack. Dastardly it was. However, it was as brave as attacks that our forces make.

If Che had been dim witted he never would have attracted the following he had. I make a point of this since I care neither for Che nor for the forces he represented.

However, to combat them one must be aware of what we fight against.

It's not specifically what Guevera did but what he represents to some people that has made him an iconic figure.

The image represents a struggle against authority, not justification of the means used to achieve it.

Dig deep enough and you'll find all heroes have feet of clay.

Ghandi was also a mysoginistic wife-beater and Mandela a convicted terrorist, but that doesn't diminish their inspirational contribution to the last century.

Conversely Stalin was a mass murderer but he also dragged a backward, poverty-ridden autocracy up to becoming a world superpower within a generation, despite the loss of 20 million lives and widespread devastation in a single war.

It's all just symbols and typical of the pop-culture religion that guides our lives.

davidf and wobbles made great comments and Pericles voiced my puzzlement much better than I could.

As wobbles pointed out, we do like our heroes or villains to be, and expect them to be, completely good or completely bad. Real simple.

I also wanted to express my approval for Pericles comment.

Hello Foxy,

Good succinct post. Some post-Russell philosophers would say the theist gods "subsist" in societies, having a cultural existence, rather than a real existence. Else put, gods exist as ideas, because ideas, in a sense, exist.

Pericles,

I was taken in by the Discussion Title too, expecting, well... not what said.

Albeit, a certain Jewish medicant, after a few centuries in the Middle Eastern sausage machine, comes-out the other end, a god.

In the Thirty-Third Century, Pericles, Foxy, Oliver ... who knows:

Maybe, we three,become a divine trinity; wherein, we are only real trinity. The earlier Eygptian, Babylonian and Christian trinities are ignored*. And billions of people believe this assertion.

Say OLO says. we are god (trinity). Or, to be emphatic, here, today, in OLO, it is asserted Peracles, Foxy and Oliver are god; three substances(ousia)of the one and only god.

Justification?

We are necessarily god, and OLO, is infallible Holy Writ, because said infallible OLO and this post, which is infallible, says so.

Yet,if an infallible post says we are god; do we have the choice not to be god?

Herein, how we are, as god, "determined" by scripture? Have we the Free Will to not be god? We can't, while scripture remains infallible.
If we don't have Free Will can we be god? Yet, if OLO becomes fallible, allowing us Free Will, it is fair to question the statements OLO contains.

O.

* Just as tritarian, undifferentiated Christianity ignores its trinity templates.