OT: What's your religeon?

[Cheeze]

There is no god but Aaron and his word is Space Empires!!

Renegade...we don't walk like zombies. We just sit and stare at computer screens, occasionally pushing a key or clicking the mouse.

[Thermodyne]

Agnostic here. I was raised Prespy, but as I got older I couldn’t continue to take unsubstantiated stories as truth. Then as I actually acquired some historical knowledge of religion, it became apparent that the sciences and religion could not coexist in logical world. Finding that religion could not withstand the checks and balances applied to science, I found myself no longer believing. Now, when I look at religions, I find one universal feature. They all share one aspect, other than the Supreme Being thing. They are all designed to maintain the power base of a rather elite group of people. And for the most part, all of the root religions have at some point in time actually dictated to their people. Of course the religions that grew out of dictatorships, monarchies and empires were the most guilty of this. And then there is the one universal constant. When there is almost no reason to make war on the people just beyond the frontier, religion will provide a reason.

[Fyron]

Thermodyne said:
They all share one aspect, other than the Supreme Being thing.

Actually very few religions have a "supreme being"... Monotheism is the exception, not the rule (in terms of comparing religions themselves, not some pointlessly silly comparision based on number of worshippers).

[deccan]

A correction if you please: I don't think that religions provide a "reason" to make war. But religions do, I think, provide an "excuse" to make war.

To explain myself, I believe that most armed conflicts are due to rather mundane reasons: land grabs, disputes over natural resources, tit-for-tat revenge attacks etc that are readily understood in terms of normal human psychology.

But most people like to think of themselves as being good guys and would feel bad about plundering and killing others. In such cases, religion can provide an excuse to get people "all worked up" so to speak, by giving the conflict a moralistic tone and making it feel to like war is some kind of righteous, noble act.