I don’t think so.
Sooner we move on from this restrictive institution i.e. Religion, better the society we can form.
I have loads of opinion when it comes to this subject but I shall wait for a debate to get in flow.
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Dont think the internet is ready for another OA religion thread
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I’d love to know what @I2004 thinks of this.
I’m out lads
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I have no problem with it as long as it doesn’t tell people how to behave.
It rules people by fear and lies, while claiming to be loving and forgiving.
Every religion claims theirs is the right one, while every other religion is wrong.
What an unreliably childish state of affairs, and they expect us to follow their teachings, no matter how bizarre and stupid.
It has no place in a civilised society.
They are unelected and tell people how to behave because of a belief in something that happened thousands of years ago in an uncivilised, uneducated era.
How it is still thriving in the modern age is astonishing.
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Didnt need it in the first place really.
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Religion as a tool to justify actions such as terrorism or prejudice is a problem but if it wasn’t Religion that people hid behind for the reason they carry out those actions it would be something else.
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Of course we did (from an evolutionary perspective, the fact that disparate cultures in isolated parts of the world all developed their own sort of religion is proof that we did, if this need didn’t exist there’s no way to explain why this happened…). Man needs to believe there is some purpose to his existence. It’s one of the basic needs since we have consciousness/an awareness of our own existence. Religion as we know it should continue to fall by the wayside due to its incompatibility with what we’ve learned in the last few centuries, but it’s always going to be replaced by other things that fulfill man’s basic need to feel there is purpose or meaning, and there’s no guarantee those things are any less destructive on the societal level.
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Think we needed it.
If not for religion, it would have been hard to bring people together.
Food & Survival would have been only agenda in human life & there would have been no unity at all.
Religion provided a style of living which organised humans a lot.
Much of human advancement comes to the fact that Religion provided the strong platform, although inhibiting at times.
But now Humans have enough things to live for strive for and Religion has been reduced to mere footnote in day to day life.
It’s only significance is when it is used for Terrorism.
I’d rather be a good person of my own volition than be bribed or threatened into it on the (unprovable) promise of either respective eternal bliss or damnation. That does however mean that I have to take responsibility for my own actions, which will admittedly be a bit of a shit if I ever get a taste for genocide.
IMO it’s now merely a defunct control mechanism which worked brilliantly to explain a lot of things science has since dealt with. People will wake up eventually I suppose.
Given the choice I’d probably join the United Atheist Alliance over the Unified Atheist League. But don’t even get me started on the Allied Atheist Alliance. Fuck those fucking otters.
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Christ, you know it’s the international break when football fans turn into quasi-philosophers.
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I think it’s because people have an entrenched fear of the future, the unknown, things that they can’t influence.
It’s always been this way through time and that’s why for some people, having an omniscient figure up in the sky is somehow comforting for them?
I’m agnostic rather than atheist however; i tend to see the world around us, ‘Mother Nature’ and the wider environment as the real higher being to whom we should be paying more attention.
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Bit hypocritical of me to like this given my post above but…I laughed.
I’m agnostic as well. I was raised in a super religious household so I can see the benefits of being religious, if you actually follow the teachings. One of the main issues is religious people using said religion to be corrupt e.g. catholic church members sexually abusing children. However just because the bible has been proven wrong doesn’t necessarily mean that God doesn’t exist. There are far too many mysteries of life for me to jump into that bandwagon. Why do we have conciousness, what is the 96% of the universe made up of ect. Not everyone is built the same mentally either. Some people need that hope for the future to keep them sane in their lives, regardless of whether it’s true or not. Besides then you do start to get into a very philosophical discussion of what is and isn’t brainwashing. A lot of aspects of your life can be defined as just that. Imo college/university is every bit the same as being brainwashed into religion.
I broadly agree but there are (I think) evidently acts that wouldn’t be committed without religion. Religion is sometimes the cause of such behaviour, rather than merely being the excuse for it.
I used to enjoy debating the existence of God but I’ve grown bored of it over the years, neither side are particularly open to change so it never goes anywhere. The way I see it now is that we’re all atheist in our attitude towards nearly all of the numerous Gods that have “existed” throughout human history, I just go one further than a lot of people and disbelieve in all of them.
If having an imaginary friend makes people behave better and gives people a sense of comfort or purpose, good for them. I only get irked when people try and bring religion into matters of public policy. Or when people criticise cartoonists rather than the people who react violently to someone drawing a cartoon of their precious prophet. Or when people use religion as justification for their bigotry. Or if a religious person questions my capability to be a moral being because I’m an atheist at the same time as thinking that AIDs is bad but condoms are worse. Or those people who praise God when a child is cured of cancer but don’t apply that logic across the board and curse God for giving the child fucking cancer in the first place.
On reflection, there’s quite a lot about religion that annoys me haha
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Religion, do we need it anymore?
That’s not really for me to say, People can believe in whatever they like the way I see it. Who am I to cast judgement on others deeply held beliefs.
I certainly don’t agree with belittling or mocking others beliefs either, although that sort of childish behavior is something you mainly see through the anonymity of the internet. It doesn’t really account for interactions in day to day real life.
What really annoys me in general is ignorance and baseless generalizations from people who don’t really understand what their talking about bit like a stubborn donkey. I’ll always have time for a well thought out and articulated argument.
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Add a poll of all the religions ??
The only thing that really bothers me is that I can’t comprehend how in 2016, with all we’ve learnt as a species, that people will live their lives taking prompts from texts dating back a thousand years or more.
I see a difference between spirituality and religion and have no qualms with spirituality and people looking for answers or looking to a deity, even if they eventually want to make some of those answers up (I’m sure if you asked 100 people what heaven was like you’d get 100 variations with some wishful thinking in there too) as it’s beautiful and I’m genuinely envious and wish I was lucky enough to live my life with faith like that, but I just can’t get my head around the need to be part of the official club or follow the official rulebook.
I actually bothered to sit and read a chunk of the old testament as an adult after only really looking at it when I was a kid and it’s pretty baffling. God makes humanity in his own image, and then he’s already disobeyed by the first ones? Then they have kids, and one of them murders the other one? So the first two generations are already broken so we really had no chance from that beginning 
I do find religious debates slightly ironic on football websites though. I know Arsenal people that hate Tottenham people because they’re Tottenham people and the tribal side of football has come to violence many times when in reality it’s pretty meaningless. But some people really want to be part of a club that much that they enjoy their blind faith and want it all to mean something more and take it more seriously than others. I think there are a lot of people that very much enjoy the fact that they would never look at another club no matter how inferior theirs becomes and how superior another may become, and no matter what this is the one we believe in so we’ll try and justify why ours is better and theirs is worse. But really, what is it about the club you happened to choose for whatever reason that makes it any better than any other club? People indulge in supporting and loving their club because they enjoy it, but then many will willingly indulge in the loathing of that club’s rivals too when there’s no real need to as it shouldn’t really affect your enjoyment of watching your club play football.
So I can understand that once people let religion get under their skin, why they’d be protective of it and take it so seriously and for some to the point that it becomes extreme when people are willing to let less important things get under their skin too. Maybe people aren’t willing to die for their football club at this moment, but if they’re willing to sign up to die for their country (and that be considered a noble thing), I can understand why they’d die for their religion too.
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It’s a shame religious people who look at people who don’r believe as being ignorant, don’t have the same attitude.
Plenty of religious people mock and despise people who do not hold the same views as them.
Hence why I didn’t use the word ‘religion’ or refer to people who believe in the conventional religions. I used the the term ‘beliefs’ because it includes thing like Spiritualism and Atheism. My point goes both ways
Let’s talk about this instead, far more interesting 
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