Interview With An Ex-Vampire

[Flash_hound]

@ Hasalameth

Why would you want that? I think everyone finds their own path and if we all followed one faith life would be bland

[journyman161]

I'd think the whole point of Life is for individual Points of View. There are so many of us & we all have uniqueness in common :grin: To quote - 'If you & I were exactly the same, one of us would be unnecessary.'

The desire for 'one world, one love, one faith and one people' has killed more innocents than any other cause - it's called religion. Who gets to decide the world, the love, the faith or the people? The answer till now has been 'MY God.'

True humanity comes once one realises the 'black & white' of 'one world, one love, one faith and one people' points of view are fakes & Life is relative - ie. shades of grey

[Rhone]

History has shown that no matter how noble the stated ideals of a religion may be, they absolutely will be abused by corrupt leaders in any society that allows for religion to be tied in with political and/or financial power. Likewise, those who gain power through their religious affiliation will inevitably have a motivation for maintaining (and expanding) their religion's dominance. Some will do this through relatively benign means (by, for example, promoting their religion through charitable acts), and some will do this through more deceptive or malicious means, like coercing people with threats (e.g. eternal damnation) and persecuting members of other religions.

Regarding "one religion"... I personally used to think that spirituality should only be a personal thing, that people should all privately meditate on their own and decide on their own spiritual beliefs. I have a very strong antipathy toward the Judeo-Christian practice of having large groups of people go to churches/temples to have a small handful of people dictating spiritual beliefs to them. But later on I realized that it is unfair and quite unrealistic for me to expect everyone to have the same perspective that I do; it is a feature of my personality that I have a strong desire to take nothing I'm told at face value, to explore everything, and to decide on my spiritual beliefs for myself. My inclination toward solitary spiritual exploration is, to put it mildly, relatively rare (I'm speaking, of course, of the general population--not on this forum ).

A great many people don't have such a desire to be strongly spiritual, but instead have a desire to experience religion as a social activity. And some people need to be religious, but want to have beliefs given to them in a simplified form so they can worship and then put their energy into something they are more interested in. As distasteful as I might personally find it, this is actually quite okay--as long as people don't let themselves be led on the path of hatred and intolerance. The key is that people have to respect each other's right to have their own beliefs and live their lives with their own styles.

But that's the hard part, as categorizing people into in-groups and out-groups and then discriminating based on those categorizations seems to be an inescapable part of human nature.

[CFTraveler]

I was thinking that it's more than religion, that it's ideology. For example, communism (as used by the Soviets and Chinese in the last century) used comparable (or worse) force to stamp out individualism, remove any possibility of individual rights, and completely subjugate a people. And all this without 'religion'. In fact, religious thought was prohibited as much as any other type of individual thought, such as art and literature that was not dedicated to the cause. Yet the abuses of individual rights were as fanatical as any religious cause.
So, this leads me to believe that it is not religion in the sense of 'belief in a specific religious doctrine' that causes the problem, but 'blind belief in a specific doctrine', whether it's religious or not, that does it.
When I was in college in the seventies, I knew many socialist fanatics that were convinced that the communist ideal would save the world. But they steadfastly ignored the realities of what was happening around them (in Cuba, specifically, and the few that admitted reality (what they could see) still upheld the idea that all the unfair (and sometimes heinous) things that happened were for the benefit of the collective. These people were as blind to reality as any religious fanatic I have ever seen, and the thinking was the same. Instead of blind belief in a religious leader, they had blind belief in the ideological leader, whether it was Marx, Lenin, Castro or Mao. It was scary.
So I think that it is important to remember that the zealous drive that propels people to do heinous acts is not always religious (or pertaining to what would be considered a religion) but always driven by ideology and belief.