kanesrealm

If you are a sincere person of faith believing in god and your religion I have no problem with you as an individual. In my lifetime, thus far, my friends have been Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Christian but never set foot in a church, spiritual but thoroughly confused and only one admitted atheist. One of my closest friends was an Orthodox Priest who died at the age of 57 of a variety of catastrophic diseases. He passed away over sixteen years ago and I still regularly think of him. At his funeral his wife told me that he considered me his best friend. We never talked about religion or God, that's not what he wanted. He needed a refuge from the pettiness of Church life and the bullshit his lay council subjected him to. We smoked, drank, ate, stretched our intellects and bitched about the then destruction of the Batman movie franchise. He was intelligent, perceptive and spoke four languages, including Russian and I assure you he knew that I was not simply a lapsed Catholic b...

There are two topics you are never supposed to talk about, politics and religion. Sadly, it's absolutely true. If you want to start an argument or damage your personal relationships just open up these topics. Especially religion. This taboo subject can and does cause strife. So let's open it up. Nothing will get you the stinkface faster than saying you're an atheist. First we'll get some general housekeeping out of the way. An atheist doesn't believe in god the singular or gods the plural. An agnostic believes that humans cannot know God or anything beyond material phenomenon. It should be pointed out that most agnostics adhere to a very loose version of this philosophy, simply saying they don't know whether there is a God or not. A deist believes in a personal God based on reason and that God created the world subject to natural laws and takes no interest in it. Then there's everybody else, the faithful if you will. The three so called Great Religions of ...

Which is more powerful, the truth or the lie told so often that it becomes reality? God and our Founding Fathers are invoked with the ease of spreading peanut butter. What follows are not my words. "Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize..." Thomas Paine "When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself and God does not take care to support it, so that it's professors are obliged to call for the help of the civil power, 'tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one." Benjamin Franklin "Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony & irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from ...