Chris.B wrote:
On Oct 16, 7:21 am, Roger Hunt wrote:

I prefer to put the price of card and stamp into a Cancer Research
charity collection tin.
Just imagine how much good a million times that sum could do, rather
than a mountain of cards which are of no practical use whatsoever.
--
Roger Hunt

Amen! Let the real doctors have a real chance to cure the suffering
of millions before one priest gets a chance to kill one sick child.
You'd think with each new iteration of religion that they would
improve their usefulness for the majority. All they ever offer is pain
and suffering if you don't believe. And grinding poverty of the
intellect if you do. Religion is a human reaction to having too small
a mind to cope with the size and complexity of our universe. Or even
our own despoiled world. The bible is the village mentality written
down for pedants. Not one second in everlasting torment would have
been be wasted, in your vision of hell, if it left my mind unscathed
by your dangerous, superstitious nonsense. Religion offers no filter
or instrument which aids vision or understanding of anything but the
crippled inadequacy of the average human mind to cope with the very
ordinary.

Better dead than a bible read.

I could just as easily say that it takes a large, open mind to suspend
disbelief, ignore the blatant violations of human rights and the laws of
physics, and process enough of scripture to see that there is a lot of good
and moral teaching in it (no matter what religion).

But I won't. :-)

Just like brushing away sand in search of evidence of the physical, one must
brush away the inadequaciesof scripture, to see evidence of the spiritual.
In either case, one first has to _want_ to find it.

There are two kinds of people in this world (yeah, that's right, just two
snerk), those who see the good, and those who see the bad. The Fransican's
say, "Better to light a candle, than to curse the darkness."

We accomplish more in the next generation by our example, than we do by all
of our chest thumping. My example to my kids is not to eviscerate their
beliefs, but to encourage the consideration of other possibilities.

In spite of the existence or non-existence of some divine source of the
universe or multiverse, it is men that are evil, and men that are good, and
the gods they imagine, are are a reflection of who they are.

My god is good, and kick's ass whenever someone's bad god appears. I know
this to be true, because I haven't killed anyone yet. ;-)

---
Steve Paul