I thought of that fine old movie, Gunga Din, with its attacking Thugees, whose god sent them out to strangle everyone else… especially the British who were then in control of India.
And then there are the politico-religions, like absolute Maoist Communism (read China) where the state religion controls the number of births and immediately executes those it disagrees with.
America. America. 80% of you, it seems, believe in God with the great majority believing firmly in a six-day creation and a Jesus who rose from the dead (not to mention the symbolizing of his means of execution, the cross, as their prime symbol… Lenny Bruce once remarked that if Jesus had been executed in the 1950s, young girls would run around with little silver electric chairs on chains around their necks.)
Even when I hear one religious type say that they can tolerate other religious types, I believe it only up to the point where they aren’t all trying to pick up the same cookie from the tray of life.
When religion comes up in the Presidential primaries it is always an unquestioned necessity that the candidate believe – and even if they don’t, that they say they do. Then we have to watch them pray, and don their yarmulkes in the synagogues, and take off their shoes in the mosques, and bow to the altar in the RC church … all to symbolize that they believe and therefore they are the one true candidate.
Religion in Fear. Being Faith Based means being Fear Based. Fear of Hell. Fear of not being in the social group. Fear of the vast unknown.
To me, the Pope, Bin Laden, Dobson, and all the rest of the true believers, have to be intellectually disowned if Civilization is to proceed.