Many are quick to point out the benefits of religion in civilization as the bond that keeps us together; a bond, which keeps society from disrupting into chaos and spontaneously turning to anarchy. Yet, to do so without discussion of the flip side of the coin is misleading at best. Religion may have its place in mankind's groupings, but we must understand what we give up for it in return for its few benefits.
Some of these draw backs to religion are the loss of innovation from self derived will, having replaced that with the will of God, told to us by those who control that line of thinking in a particular religion. Some say that religion has helped man survive over the last 100,000 years of modern man. Religion has been known to cause incredible wars and helped mislead people into having wars, which are not very bright. Religion as a control mechanism has been able to allow humans to forget their innate needs of self-preservation and give them to a cause, even give up his life for a line of reasoning completely controlled and modified to fit another man's personal gain of power or will.
Religion based on good versus evil seems to be one of interesting, and actually hard to condemn on the surface. The problem with this is that it is too easily left for interpretation of what is good and what is evil. It is easy to say something or someone is evil having no real experiences with that set of persons, state or that populations belief systems and form of government.
Black, Red, yellow, is evil for instance; Why? Because the other team wears those colored jerseys or the other country has those colors on the flag. Often religion uses this realm of logic to build its power base of little human followers. To build any team you need a cause and one people joining the team can relate with. If you need to build a strong team, a strong adversary; therefore "Evil" is often a good cause to fight. Next step simply find something to name evil and make it believable. In some cases we pick an easily defeat able enemy and blow him out of proportion, this serves the enemy's goals too, for his power base recruitment of followers.
Osama Bin Ladin therefore was considered a strong enemy, although in numbers not too strong. Lots of followers, although not too many followers; such a little clan could not put a dent in the human population of 6.6 Billion humans or could they? They certainly were doing their duty on the people of Afghanistan and growing drugs for the whole world and thus polluting the minds of men, women and children the world over. Polluted minds are more easily led astray and controlled by their leadership and religions. Some may have appreciated the dummying down effect these drugs had on their populous allowing them less hardship in the control of their people. On the surface Osama Bin Ladin's trained bad guys appear to be strong warriors for Allaah, but really they are being led astray and brainwashed. They have given their minds to serve Osama, who conveniently modified the religion. So the great warriors are merely weak men with weak minds following like ship to their death to serve the will of the hijacker of Islam. The human innate will and their minds has been modified for the greed of a single man. They these warriors are then able to achieve strength from a band of guys of like mind or lack of mind. They are further brain washed.
When we look at World Religions are they really any better than these renegade scourge of the Earth pitiful little humans causing a ruckus or are they just doing it a little less obvious on a lot bigger scale? Think about it.
"Lance Winslow" - If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; www.WorldThinkTank.net/wttbbs