Penty, I shall just leave you in a fantasy world then, arguing flaws in religion is tedious, and if it gets tight then the answer 'god moves in mysterious ways' crops up, meaning a waste of time, energy and precious intellect.
Give me an example of one of religeons flaws that is not to do with corruption or people following religous teachings blindly. Go ahead. And Jubal please dig something out becuase I'm getting pissed off with arragont llamas like Dawkins and I don't believe that it would counter my arguements as it seems like the sort of thing aimed to insult and counter the beliefs of fundamentalists.
Also the god moves in mysterius ways thingy can be very comforting to people
For a start, if religion doesn't exist in thei first place it's technically not possible to follow it blindly.
So we can split religion into two effects; fundieism, and the comfort factor. We also have to take into account that no major religion can claim to have eliminated fundieism, therefore we must assume that it is a built in side effect of religion.
Other points include;
- Religion is a waste of human resources. The church owns vast amounts of land (not including churches and rectories, large parts of many countries are legally owned by the church). If the state owned said land we could put it to use helping the poor or whatever.
- Religion is a worry to some people as well as a comfort. People often worry that they have done something which some one up there diapproves of, which negates the comfort factor altogether.
- Religion is an impediment to science (all but very moderate religion requires a belief in some sort of miracle or at least perfection on earth, which requires an alleviation of scientific principles). I know this one doesn't apply to you, but frnaky your Christianity borders on Deism anyway.
That's a start, I'll carry on tomorrow or something.
My personal view is that at the moderate end (i.e. moderate to the point it allows them to accept all scientific principles as base, unchangeable facts and so on) religion is not a prblem either to me or society as a whole. I think it should rmeain a perosnal belief and a choice - and it's the choice element that's important.
My strongest criticism of a lot of fundamentalist or even some relatively moderate religions is not that they allow thier worshippers to by and large believe as fact a buncha weedheaded codswallop some fool wrote 2000 years back (by which I mean the insane and clealry rubbish bits of the bible/koran/torah), but that they teach thier children this as fact too - which I consider practically criminal, no child should have thier belief chosen without thier consent, they should be allowed to condier the facts from a balanced perspective as adults.