Julie, isnt religion, like science, a mixed bag? Religion gave us humanism along with witches, and science gave us penicillin along with the atomic bomb and thalidomide. There is a Chinese saying i like -
everything has two handles, beware of the wrong one.
I fear that religious thinking has doomed us. The threat of flood meant nothing to Noah's neighbors. Such warning did not work then and they are not working now. At one end of the spectrum we have people who think they believe in "god" but can't discern his/her voice. At the other end of the spectrum we have the faithful who believe all this chaos is the will of "god" and will usher in a glorious afterlife. They cannot discern the beauty of this existence and have been corrupted into seeing nothing but sin and ugliness here, preferring to abandon what we have for an imaginary future - either among the angels or among the stars on another planet. To riff on Adrianne Maree Brown, we are trapped by the (flawed) imaginations of other people.
Julie, isnt religion, like science, a mixed bag? Religion gave us humanism along with witches, and science gave us penicillin along with the atomic bomb and thalidomide. There is a Chinese saying i like -
everything has two handles, beware of the wrong one.
So true, Doug. They are mixed bags, I think, because they share a critical component - human beings and all our foibles.
I fear that religious thinking has doomed us. The threat of flood meant nothing to Noah's neighbors. Such warning did not work then and they are not working now. At one end of the spectrum we have people who think they believe in "god" but can't discern his/her voice. At the other end of the spectrum we have the faithful who believe all this chaos is the will of "god" and will usher in a glorious afterlife. They cannot discern the beauty of this existence and have been corrupted into seeing nothing but sin and ugliness here, preferring to abandon what we have for an imaginary future - either among the angels or among the stars on another planet. To riff on Adrianne Maree Brown, we are trapped by the (flawed) imaginations of other people.