People who need to feel 'united' are weak-kneed sissies.

Words I'd use to describe BOAZ include:

Afraid, insecure, anxious, paranoid, faint-hearted, fearful and terrified.

Words I'd use to describe myself:

Calm, unafraid, unworried and confident.

It's a pathological thing.

I'd link you in with my local mental health service BOAZ, but I'm not your case manager.

Good one Strayan.
Yuyutsu, Religion is a ‘faith’. Faith is believing something even if there is no evidence for it. It doesn’t necessarily require something supernatural to worship. Atheism is the opposite of faith and prescribes no particular behaviour. An atheist simply says I will not believe in a god until you can prove scientifically that such an entity exists. An agnostic is a fence sitter in this regard.
only Christians, keen to distance themselves, call Hitler an atheist.
Read these: Genesis 15:29 the Lord tells Baasha to kill "all of the house of Jeroboam".20:28-30 God assists the Israelites to kill 10,000 Syrians. 1:9-12 Elijah shows that he is "a man of God" by burning 102 men to death. 3:19-25 God instructs the Israelites to destroy the Moabites. (Deu 13:6-10 NRSV)…The Bible says to kill your wife, your daughter, your son, your brother, your friend, etc… if they worship other gods. Show them no pity or compassion and do not shield them. But you shall surely kill them; your own hand shall be first against them to execute them, and afterwards the hand of all the people. Stone them to death for trying to turn you away from the LORD your God…
The difference between Science and religion is that when scientific theories are proved wrong, they are changed. Religions do not change and hang on to two thousand year old superstitions despite scientific proof of their wrongness.
Religion is a contamination of human thinking, not the other way round. The essence of all religions is gaining power.

Ybgirp,

There are indeed "weak agnostics" who sit on the fence. There are also "strong agnostics" who strongly believe that the existence or non-existence of God can never be known.

None of the examples you presented from the bible calls to kill every non-believer. Not that I agree with such injuctions, but all cases call only for the killing of a specific group, and none because they are non-believers (most of the victims believed in God as well, but also in others), but mainly because they worship other gods at the wrong place and pose a temptation for the Jews to do so as well.

Religions have changed and continue to change - but slowly over the centuries.

Faith is not religion, but a component of most religions: it is essentially a practice, a discipline, a technique, of having a certain attitude towards life and living accordingly. It is quite different than a belief, it is not a claim about the physical universe, hence it cannot be refuted by science, and in fact, were science able to prove the "correctness" of a faith, it would do that faith more harm than proving its "incorrectness", because it would reduce the faith into a matter of practicality.

People over the ages have much forgotten what religion is about, and distorted it to the extent that onlookers who take only a superficial look, see only the contaminations and distortions, such as the power-seeking that you mentioned.

Power-seeking is contrary to the essence of religion - any religion. It is not spiritual, but pure materialism: one seeks power only if they believe that they are powerless and helpless by nature, that they are separate from God, that they have no inherent connection with others at the core, and therefore need to dominate them to obtain material gains. That is so contrary to faith!

Well the PM has finally killed off multiculturalism in the Commonwealth administration. Itll be intresting to see wether Mr Rudd garrantees to restore it.

Yuyutsu, what you describe is philosophy. All religions contain some philosophical elements, but only insofar as they assist in the control of subjects.
Garth, I sure hope not.

Then there is that current affair story about a women who is allergic to peanuts and has to fly in her job - so she wants the airline to bane all peanut products on her flights. Her allergy is HER problem and represents about .001% of the population. It's a case of minority groups again trying to highjack the rest of us. Current Affair is off my list of credable stories - it's just sensationalistic crap.