Dear Oscar,

I hear you're becoming an annoying person
who misinterprets everything.(giggle).

Oscar
I don't believe that is what most of the previous posters are arguing other than both sides are corruptible. How will religion put honesty and rights back into the system? We have a bevy of religious politicians now and it does not seem to make much difference in regard to influence of lobbyists.

Religion was used as a tool of discrimination, prejudice and was marked by great abuses of power - so I am not sure how a return to religion interfering in governing will improve the situation any. What if women had to all start wearing veils because of religious doctrine or be stoned?

We need to stick to a democratic system with better checks and balances and greater participation by citizens. There is no such thing as a perfect system but there is room for improvement.

Oscar it is not a choice between individualism or god. There are many more options. Individualism as you describe it should be called capitalism inspired atomisation or anticollectivism. It is marked by greed, selfishness, excess and not caring about others. It drives crime, isolation, discrimination, inequality and conflict.

Real Individualism is the simple fact that we are all unique and different and that it is one of humanities greatest strengths. It should be encouraged and nurtured and the facilitation of our individuality and potential should be the overriding goal of any social, political or economic system. It takes empathy, compassion and tolerance and is a lot harder than dog eat dog, law of the jungle, winner takes all society we live in today. Remember if you win the rat race your still a rat.

It is also far from the mindless zombification of the masses by religion with its homogeneity and straitjacket morality. A less individualistic system I cannot imagine.

And just as i thought that we could once again have a nation that puts God first and actually live with high morals and family values.

Nietzsche said that God is Dead ( The thought of God is dead) and that we need something ''Beyond Good and evil ''

The point of the post is that we change nothing.The end is the same.
The minority can not change the nation if the majority like living thier spoon-fed conditioned lives among the materialistic world.

A wise Man once told me that the greatest trick the devil performs is presenting us with the illusion that he does not exist.

One way of doing this is to condition the people that God does not exist,therefore there is no heaven or hell and no good or evil.

Thus,the need to move beyond good and evil.

We are dancers to a discordant system and we continue that system with our own lies and illusions,such as this forum for example.

We like to think that we are all intelligent and participate in an honest discussion of the topics here on this forum,but in actual fact all we do is try to hit the hardest against each other.

So in a way we argue with ourselves while the masters look on all the while we dont look beyond ourselves and overcome them.

The prolem is that if we really belived that we could remove ourselves from the herd we would not be posting upon this forum for ever and a day as we move beyond this talk and place our thoughts out there for change.

Our masters can be overcome the same way they overcome the slaves.
By condition of the slaves.
We have rights,we have a democracy.The problem is that we do not know the laws and we dont use our rights and our knoweledge properly.

Oscar,
it's not a matter of conditioning the people to believe that god doesn't exist. It suits the powers that be to maintain that he does. In any case, the people are already conditioned to believe that he does exist... Think about it; is not belief in god (which god?) conditioning?
It's a very meet question indeed, the nature of reality; there are a great many philosophers, including today's anti-foundationalists, who've argued that phenomena, in itself, is inaccessible. Everything is mediated by language (games), and language is in a constant state of flux, intertextuality and deferral of meaning. But this is a long way from your (I gather) leap of faith in a god, or that the "World is corrupt and reality is a lie". The nature of reality, in itself, is ambiguous; we have no way of verifying our perception of it. But that doesn't mean that our perception is distorted; it could be that there's a perfect anthropocentric match between phenomena and perception. But then the "reality" we perceive is only an assemblage of finite parts--elements, molecules and atoms in a temporal flux, for instance.
Quite right to be sceptical of "reality", but to deny it outright, and to condemn it as evil, is to indulge in pure fantasy--since it is vastly more ambiguous than the "reality" our senses inform us of. Moreover, this is to assume a great deal about collectivism, since presumably the evil "reality" is a collective delusion/punishment, rather than an evil reality taylored to each individual?
Is it not more healthily sceptical, and wise, to simply acknowledge the dubiousness of reality, without compounding human obtuseness by conjuring up, or subscribing to, another "reality"--one which doesn't even have the saving grace of being accessible to the senses?