Calling religion a mental illness

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what? i dont care what you think in your own mind. its none of my f*****g business. its when you start telling me what to think as though you have the right to that i get pissed off. you are the ones calling thoughts and beliefs a disease that needs to eradicated. pardon me for finding that insulting and just a little frightening.
i wish we all could just live and let live... whats so f****** hard about that? fanatics on both sides, thats what.

It's more like a shared delusion, or a massively multiplayer off-line role-playing game.

The religious people who gave these little kid signs like this to carry are obviously bat s**t crazy.

yeah, but we're not all like that. thats just the noisy minority.

The Westboro Baptist Church is an extremely noisy minority. Besides, they seem to fixate on homosexuality ONLY. They must be so busy planning to intrude funerals, they forgot all about the other ones!

When each man and woman has his or her own dealings with God, I doubt it is a shared delusion at all.

Maybe everyone who believes really does have dealings with God (if there is one). Maybe even those who don't believe have dealings with God, or will after they die! But on the other hand, maybe each individual has their individual delusion. Some people's delusions may have enough in common with other peoples' delusions that they can feel comfortable belonging to the same church. Consider the following:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLBDFe3mDtk[/youtube]

One of the best ways I think I've ever heard it put. I may use this analogy myself sometime.

I minor'd Theology in college, studied religions academically pretty much since i was old enough to read. Ordained in 98 but never done anything with it. My concurring Fnord's post says enough.

We all need to obey his teachings. What I mean is each man or woman's birth brings them into a different house, different gender, different mental mantra, different outlook, lack or abundance of opportunities. None of those differences mean anyone needs to obey jesus less, but divercity is the very reason god didn't make us robots. He wanted us to flock to him of our own free will. The arguments that denominations bring are just a pissing match. If you want to worship God, you should be able to worship him in any church you please. It matters not.
Jesus never wanted us to hate anyone either, he merely wanted us to love those ho needed care the most. If we did that with the impoverished in Africa, they might not feel as bitter towards us and prone to side with people like Al-Qaeda. We aren't doing a good enough job spreading his love, but sure are doing a great job spreading hate we don't have business spreading.

I detect a very strong bias for the Christian religion in your post. What makes you so sure that your religion is right and every other religion on the planet is wrong?

I can tell you the most likely answer. Most people's religious beliefs are due to where and when they are born and what their parents and peers believe. If you were born in India, you would probably think Hinduism is the one and only way for everyone, and how lucky for you that you are a Hindu. If you were born in Saudi Arabia, you would be SURE that Islam is the only way, and so on.

I personally see the same core message in all religions, expressed differently by and for different cultures and different times. I am not the only one who has seen it this way. For example, if one reads the Bible from a Hindu's perspective one can see Jesus teaching Hinduism. In many ways the teachings of Jesus are the same as those of the Buddha. Alan Watts (a 20th century philosopher) suggests that what happened with Christianity is the followers of Jesus put Jesus on a pedestal and worshiped the messenger instead of getting the message He was trying to teach.

Again it comes down to culture. Jesus may have had an experience of oneness with the divine, what some call an experience of cosmic consciousness. He tried to share what he experienced by telling other people about it, but He was limited to using the language and culture of the time and place where He lived. That area had a monarchical view of the universe, with God patterned after a benevolent King of the ancient Near East. Even the phrase King of Kings and Lord of Lords comes from an ancient Persian inscription about one of their rulers.

If Jesus had been born in India where oneness with the divine is not considered to be heresy, instead of being crucified people would have congratulated him on finally figuring it out and realizing it for Himself. And of course the way Christianity played out, with certain beliefs being voted on by councils and so on, it was made into a structure that made it easier to control the masses using fear.

And don't you think the Jews know what their own sacred writings say? The Christian Old Testament was lifted from the Jews. Don't you wonder why the Jews don't accept Jesus as their Messiah? It is because He did not fulfill ANY of the very specific criteria listed in the Jewish scriptures for qualifications to be the Messiah, NOT ONE! Of course the Christians claim Christ was the fulfillment of hundreds of prophecies, but most if not all of those claims look very fishy to non-Christians.

I'm sorry, if my religion is wrong than it is, and I will find out when I am reincarnated as a yakuza thug, or a leopard.

I spent two years at Seminary before switching over to Engineering. I am an elected (albeit inactive) elder at a local church. I resigned as a ruling/teaching elder out of disgust and frustration with the "Country Club" attitude of the other elders, and their interpretation of Scriptures in the context of their own ethnic culture and traditions.

Religion is all a massively organized social game, a culture club, an RPG, a fashion and talent show, and a grade-school "study hall" filled with adults, all rolled into one massive shared delusion.

... and you can quote me on that, too!

Sounds like you subconsciously assume that all religious people automatically have to attend a church of some sort regularly.

I don't mean to put you or your beliefs down, just offering a different perspective on them. I learned much of what I said from the late 20th century philosopher and self-described "spiritual entertainer" Alan Watts. While I don't agree with everything that man wrote or said, he was an eclectic genius on many subjects and quite the good speaker. I enjoy listening to audio files of him talking better than I like reading his books. When you hear him say these things, they make so much more sense than when I paraphrase them.

The main point I am trying to make is that nobody can make an objective decision about which religion is the "best" one, because we make our decision based on the standards of whatever culture we are born into. So for someone raised in the west where Christianity is the dominant religion of the culture, even if one is not a Christian those values are so ingrained into one's consciousness that they just seem right and better than those foreign religions that seem to make no sense at all! Alan Watts put it this way: you wouldn't feel right about going into a court of law where the judge and the advocate are the same person, would you?

[opinion=mine]

... because they are all equally bogus and evil.

[/opinion]

No doubt. Amazing how seeing behind the big curtain opens one's eyes. Sitting behind the mixing console in the production booth during services you really see it for what it is. A staged theatrical production. My churchiness pretty much ended with a thesis I wrote on the crucifixion. Jesus died as the result of a political hit. There were four groups involved, had it not been one it would have been the other. To the fundies, back off, do the research, the information is out there, truth be speaketh. The very first sentence of that paper was "Who is John Gault?"