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Politics : Moderate Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (9080)	4/7/2004 10:00:19 AM
From: Crocodile	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 20773

Perhaps our countrymen are "religious" because it's an easy way to believe they can salvage themselves from their own shallowness. One day a week in church makes up for the sin and ignorance of the rest of the week? I begin to think this. Religion is a short cut for shallow people who do not actually wish to put forth the effort to become intelligent and compassionate- both of which take work, imo. Interesting. I've actually been thinking about the rather incredible box-office numbers for Mel Gibson's movie. I know this is a rather scary thought, but I'm wondering if the appeal is mainly that it was a quick-and-easy way for half-assed Christians to "get religion". Yeah, I know, sounds disgusting and outrageous, but I'm serious. Also, there's definitely a sort of cliquish thing about being in the "in crowd" who have seen a movie and then profess to know all about some topic. Think back (for those who are old enough), to how the made-for-TV movie "Shogun" took America by storm and how the masses became instant experts on Japanese culture and how Japanese style coffee tables and kimonos became all the rage for a few months. I'm often quite surprised at how people seem to think that they "know" a lot about a subject, a place, or a culture just because they saw a movie or television show about it one time, or read a book about some place or event (very often a piece of fiction set in a foreign country). All of a sudden these people become armchair experts on some topic, place, culture, time period. I wouldn't be at all surprised if people now feel like they "know" all about Christ and the Bible, in much the same way that they "know" all about Frodo and Gandalf in "Lord of the Rings" after watching 3 movies about it. Painless, zip-locked, easy-to-swallow religious education for the masses.

To: epicure who wrote (9080)	4/9/2004 4:14:52 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 20773

Re: It's much more common to find people who want to use their religion as a club (either in terms of an exclusionary club, or in terms of a weapon), than who want to use it to truly become a more humane human being. I totally agree with you: "...use their religion as a club" and that's how things can turn nasty! Your crazy, fanatical televangelists --Falwell, Robertson, Graham-- are but a bunch of hatemongers who instrumentalize the bigotry of their simple-minded flocks.... Religion, even in its most fanatical version, is not that harmful so long as it doesn't rise above the grass roots. In the US, however, religious fanaticism is manipulated by power elites as a whip to galvanize public opinion. There's no separation of church and state in the US, hence I also agree with Rev Rich Lang: Message 19930461 Here's Rev R. Lang's uncensored paper: informationclearinghouse.info Religion, that is, a form of Judeo-Protestant monotheism is the glue that holds the US fabric together --yet people will eventually find out that instead of a "glue" their Christian ideology is sort of an "asbestos" that pervades the US polity.... You've carelessly breathed it for years, for decades... until you discovered its (potentially) lethal nature. Gus