Religious Whores

Criticizing religion is like shooting fish in a barrel: there's no challenge in it. The worshippers are like the fish, who surely don't like to be shot, just like believers don't like their beliefs challenged. I have no problem with people believing whatever they want to, as long as I don't have to participate, and they don't start fighting over each other's dogma. Why there have been so many wars involving religion is one sign that the Human Race is not that intelligent, and even World War Two was a religious war, for Nazi thought was a religion at its core, and the same can be said for nearly any other ideology one cares to name. Religions have a core belief, a great figure to worship, and a bunch of people to interpret the great figure's thinking for the true believers. It is here that the line between politics and religion gets blurry, and it always has been. Religion is just politicized spirituality, and I think a truly spiritual person doesn't need religion of any kind. One can love Jesus without giving a penny to the Catholic Church, for example, or any other church; one can admire Mohammed without choosing which sect of Islam to join. The fact that these schisms occured proves the political nature of religion: if it was just a matter of faith, it never would've happened. What usually happens is that the leaders of one sect become more concerned with the letter of the law and lose sight of the spirit of the law, which was Jesus' main complaint about the Pharisees, and so along will come a new sect, which in time will also lose sight of the spirit for more materialistic concerns. One can even say that the two-party system is religious, especially how it is operating today, and the antipathy between the parties. This seems to me a recent development, a pollution of the seperation of Church and State but almost to be expected, given the way most people's minds work. Of course, this degradation of the political process is not for the best, as the degradation of the spirit wrought by the very religions that sought to save us has not been good for us either. Right now the Socialists are one force operating religiously, as seen by their attacks on anyone who even mildly questions their beliefs, and the Trumpists are the other, since there is no political coherency involved in Trump's beliefs, just the notion that if you have faith in the Donald, everything will be okay. I think those stuck between these camps wish they would all go away, and it would be best for America if they did. There I go, delving into politics again. I feel unclean having done so. It only shows that the political and the religious have always been closely linked, despite the best attempts of our Founders to seperate them. People want something to belong to that can't be questioned, so the morphing of our two parties into rival sects would be exactly what those folks want. Politics demands some thinking, which people don't want to waste their time doing, while religion doesn't need any thinking at all.