But you can't have one without the other, but you can have all the positive things about religion without the actual religion.

At it's deepest and truest level, religion is entirely a personal thing. Religion can be used for ill purpose, of course, for wars, politics, greed (send $10 save your soul, haha) but the fact that not every religious person is a fundamentalist or a moron or living according to backward principles means those things are not endemic of religion.

People can be silly and stupid and horrible with or without religion. You could kill a man based on naught but a silly belief. As could I. You could follow some weird set of principles. As could I (maybe I do already :laughing:). The point I'm trying to make is we don't need to become religious to succumb to our darker sides. The line separating good and evil ain't found between believers or non-believers, it runs through every human heart.

The funny thing is I was pretty anti-religious once upon a time myself. Not as fundamental as Richard Dawkins, but I couldn't see any good in religion. I thought they were all stupid people. But that's opinions for you, innit. They're no more permanent than the seasons. Certainly not worth bickering over. Maybe I'll hate religion again one day! It's possible. :laughing:

I don't think religious people are stupid.

Virtually every religious organization and government with a state religion in the history of humanity would beg to differ.

I believe in God and Jesus, however I disregard most of the bible's rules as man-man and outdated.

I believe in both creationism and evolutionism (they aren't mutually exclusive) and incorporate beliefs of almost every religion. (I believe, despite being radically different, all gods are the same in different forms)

I agree, Mushroom Man, and suspect that religions when practised truly - be it Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, even meditation in its purest form and unaligned to any religion, are paths leading to the same experience. All paths to God, or Tao, or Oneness, or whatever name you wanna call it. They're all spoons by which we can taste the soup. The thing to remember is that the spoon is not the soup. A spoon is a spoon. The soup is what matters.

Religion is just a coping mechanism for people that can't handle the fact that when you die, that's it. Done. Just a memory.

Prove me wrong.

What does it mean to practice a religion "truly"?

To practice in such a way that a direct experience is had. At that point the belief drops away and it becomes something you taste. Something you know. It trascends language too. Which is why it can only ever be a personal thing.

I should point out I'm talking about my experience with meditation, but scientific studies suggest that the human brain, whether in religious prayer or meditation, enters the same state and are reshaped in similar ways by both.

Read this.

http://www.amazon.com/Case-God-Karen...sap_bc?ie=UTF8

The most detailed and hardest books I've ever tackled, but damn. No-one has ever summed up the most complex subject in the history of mankind better than this.

This book changed my life in that I could finally understand the people who lean on God to live life day to day.

"Armstrong is ambitious. The Case for God is an entire semester at college packed into a single book—a voluminous, dizzying intellectual history. . . . Reading The Case for God, I felt smarter. . . . A stimulating, hopeful work. After I finished it, I felt inspired, I stopped, and I looked up at the stars again. And I wondered what could be." —Susan Jane Gilman, NPR's "All Things Considered"

"Karen Armstrong's book is simply superb. Wide-ranging, detailed, well researched meticulously argued and beautifully written, it is a definitive analysis of the role of religious belief and transcendence in our history and our life." —Dr. Robert Buckman, author of Can We Be Good without God?

"Karen Armstrong, in writing The Case for God, provides the reader with one of the very best theological works of our time. It brings a new understanding to the complex relationship between human existence and the transcendent nature of God. This is a book that is so well researched and so deep with insight and soaring scholarship that only Karen Armstrong could have written it. The Case for God should be required reading for anyone who claims to be a believer, an agnostic or an atheist." —The Right Reverend John Bryson Chane, D.D., Episcopal Bishop of the Diocese of Washington, D.C.