Religion

[blue]

Religion and what it tries to do, in my mind, is summed up here - in the words of Christ:

Love the Lord your God
Love your neighbour as yourself

Once those are followed, nothing else applies. All laws will follow if you truly believe and follow these two commandments.

please enter a conversation about religion only after realizing that your western yeehaw whackjobbiness is only a minor player in the world pantheon of yeehaw whackjobiness.

religion is a codification of beliefs, usually combined with a system of laws or behaviors. it has fuck-all to do with jesus.

[Reist]

Jesus knew plenty about religion, but I suppose I was off base for just randomly saying that when I haven't really read the conversation. Sorry. Get back to your conversations.

[blue]

jesus didn't talk about religion, dude, he talked about one particular religion. i was trying to make the point that xtianity is only one of a gazillion religions, and that a lot of people very annoyingly confuse xtianity with religion in general.

[fluffy]

Also pretty much every religion which isn't just some sort of philosophical guideline for living life well is full of crazy stories which people are supposed to take as gospel truth (and which the followers do). Mormonism, Scientology, Christianity, Judaism, Shinto, and most sects of Buddhism (aside from the watered-down new-agey kind that hippies follow) are full of all sorts of nutty stories which people are supposed to take as factual history. Compared to those, classical Greco-Roman mythology (which is basically just anthropomorphism of observed facets of reality) makes perfect sense!

And of course that doesn't even scratch the surface of the many hundreds of thousands of world religions which have existed (which is probably an underestimate, even).

[Future Boy]

From http://www.nobeliefs.com/exist.htm:

"We have historical people like Hesiod and Plato who mentions Hercules. Similar to the way the gospels tell a narrative story of Jesus, so do we have the epic stories of Homer who depict the life of Hercules. Aesop tells stories and quotes the words of Hercules. Just as we have a brief mention of Jesus by Joesphus in his Antiquities, Joesphus also mentions Hercules (more times than Jesus), in the very same work (see: 1.15; 8.5.3; 10.11.1). Just as Tacitus mentions a Christus, so does he also mention Hercules many times in his Annals. And most importantly, just as we have no artifacts, writings or eyewitnesses about Hercules, we also have nothing about Jesus. All information about Hercules and Jesus comes from stories, beliefs, and hearsay. Should we then believe in a historical Hercules, simply because ancient historians mention him and that we have stories and beliefs about him? Of course not, and the same must apply to Jesus if we wish to hold any consistency to historicity.

...

People consider Hercules and other Greek gods as myth because people no longer believe in the Greek and Roman stories. When a civilization dies, so go their gods. Christianity and its church authorities, on the other hand, still hold a powerful influence on governments, institutions, and colleges."