Religion

Numbers 22:21-29 (New King James Version)
Balaam got up in the morning, saddled his ass and went with the princes of Moab.
But God was very angry when he went, and the angel of the LORD stood in the road to oppose him.
Balaam was riding on his ass, and his two servants were with him.
When his ass saw the angel of the LORD standing in the road with a drawn sword in his hand,
his ass turned off the road into a field.
Balaam beat his ass to get his ass back on the road.
Then the angel of the LORD stood in a narrow path between two vineyards, with walls on both sides.
When his ass saw the angel of the LORD, his ass pressed close to the wall, crushing Balaam's foot against it.
So he beat his ass again.
Then the angel of the LORD moved on ahead and stood in a narrow place where there was no room to turn, either to the right or to the left.
When his ass saw the angel of the LORD, his ass lay down under Balaam, and he was angry
and beat his ass with his staff.
Then the LORD opened his ass's mouth,
and his ass said to Balaam, "What have I done to you to make you beat me these three times?"
Balaam answered his ass, "You have made a fool of me! If I had a sword in my hand, I would kill you right now."

Superstition is the notion that supernatural powers created our world and interfere with its operations.
Fear of such gods and their will is banished with understanding.
By showing that the operations of the world can be accounted for entirely in terms of the regular, but purposeless motions of tiny atoms and agglomerations of atoms in interaction in empty space.
The fear of death will be banished by showing that death is the dissipation of a being's material mind.
And so, as a simple ceasing-to-be, death can be neither good nor bad for this being.
The value of life for a being is something that only matters to this being during its life.
Fear of death is a projection of terrors experienced in life, of pain that only a living (intact) mind can feel.
Lucretius also puts forward the 'symmetry argument' against the fear of death.
In it, he says that people who fear the prospect of eternal non-existence after death should think back to the eternity of non-existence before their birth, which they probably do not fear.

I like Lucretius !
My question to people since I was a kid was, weren't we dead before we were born?
If so, isn't life an abberation of our normal state?
If so, isn't the fear of death illogical?
People told the kid I was, that I was incorrect. That when I die, there will be angels, pastures, and Jesus. If I get saved, I will go to Heaven. Everyone else will go to Hell, which is a firey place where you burn forever. And that I shouldn't ask questions. I should just have faith.
Faith seems to be the fire consuming the world of mankind.
For with faith, there is an extreme lack of understanding.
I tell someone god gave me a beanstalk that reached to the sky.
Another says yes, and it had blue bells on in. Another says, yes, it glowed in the night.
And yet, another says, it was the beanstalk of life.
And everyone with faith just believes it. Those who question are told they will go to hell and they are killed by the masses of the ignorant. And the ignorant are told, "It was God's will, and it was good".
Those with faith are the sheep. They'd rather not think while they are herded into battle for land, money, or "Glory".
And they shall be called the poor, uneducated, and undesirable.
And those without faith will be learning how to grow their own beanstalk, and it will reach to the sky someday.
And they shall be called the rich, powerful and beautiful. They shall create more stories for the sheep to follow.

Darwin: "It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds which follows from the advance of science."
Voltaire: "If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities."
Einstein: "I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism."
Nietzsche: "Faith means not wanting to know what is true."
Edison: "I cannot believe in the immortality of the soul.... No, all this talk of an existence for us, as individuals, beyond the grave is wrong. It is born of our tenacity of life – our desire to go on living … our dread of coming to an end."
Lincoln:"The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma."
Arthur C. Clarke: "Religion is a byproduct of fear. For much of human history, it may have been a necessary evil, but why was it more evil than necessary? Isn't killing people in the name of God a pretty good definition of insanity?"
Thomas Jefferson: "Religions are all alike – founded upon fables and mythologies."
Kurt Vonnegut: "Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile."
Bertrand Russell: "Religion is based . . . mainly on fear . . . fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. . . . My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race."

As usual, I had to argue with them. I don't know why I waste my time with these people. Some 18 year olds with a Mormon bible or whatever they call it, came by preaching the word, or whatever they call it. LOL.
I told them as long as they believe in doing good, feeding the hungry, help the elderly, improving the quality of life, their on the right track, but I didn't believe in their religion.
Their ideas seem pretty weird too me. But then again, most all religions I've learned about seem weird.
They were rambling on about how you must be Baptized before you die so your spirit doesn't go to hell and yada yada.
I said, spirit! What is a spirit? They said its that part of you that goes on after you die.
I asked them, is there proof that something like that exists? They said they could feel it.
I asked why do you think it exists? Can you measure it? No, but the bible says it exists.
I asked them if they believe everything they hear, like do they really believe Joseph Smith had a vision? And why?
Its all so bizarre.
I can't get over, how the idea of a spirit evolved in the first place.
And how it must have evolved from ideas to full blown religions.
And then religions evolved further to tell all kinds of unbelievable stories.
And how people just believe these stories, without question.
There is no proof that spirits exist.
Some say they see them. Some say they feel them. Some say they hear them. Some say they speak for them.
Am I wrong for thinking these people are delusional?
I see miracles everywhere, that I can see, touch, and measure Why can't these people see them too?

"For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" (Matthew 16:26)
To me, that sentence just doesn't make any sense. I was raised in a religious family, and the definition for the soul was something in you, the lives on after you die. If that were so, "loses his own soul" would be a silly thing to say, at best. It would infer that God will strike successful business people down, or something strange like that.
But that could not have been what the Bible said. That was what it was translated to say.
The word soul did not exist in Biblical times.
The word soul, originated in 970 AD from the word sawol, centuries after Mathew was written.
If the Bible's translation had said:
"For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own life?"
like it should have, it would make sense, even to a small child.
The word "soul", in the sense we use it today, did not exist in Hebrew or Aramaic,
It existed in Greek. Ancient Greeks typically referred to the soul as psyche (as in modern English psychology). Aristotle's works in Latin translation, used the word anima (as in animated), which also means "breath". In the New Testament, the original Greek word used is "Psyche" which in Ancient and Modern Greek means soul.

Plato, drawing on the words of his teacher Socrates, considered the soul as the essence of a person. He considered this essence as an incorporeal, eternal occupant of our being, the determines how we behave. As bodies die the soul is continually reborn in subsequent bodies. The Platonic soul had three parts:
1. the logos (mind, nous, ego, or reason)
2. the thymos (emotion, superego, or spiritedness)
3. the pathos (appetitive, id, or carnal)

The logos was the charioteer, directing the horses balance of appetite and spirit. It allows for logic to prevail, and for the optimisation of balance.
The thymos comprises our emotional motive, that which drives us to acts of bravery and glory. If left unchecked, it leads to hubris -- the most fatal of all flaws in the Greek view.
The pathos equates to the appetite that drives humankind to seek out its basic bodily needs. When the passion controls us, it drives us to hedonism in all forms. In the Ancient Greek view, this is the basal and most feral state.

They rewrite the Bible all the time.
I remember reading:
If thine right eye offend thee, pluck it out.
I remember its meaning as:
If something bothers you that you can't fix, get away from it, separate it from yourself.
See, being raised as a good Christian, I didn't believe in self mutilation.
None of these are what I remember reading when I was a kid.
The following are several translations of the Bible, Mathew:18:8
ASV: And if thine eye causeth thee to stumble, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is good for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into the hell of fire.
BBE: And if your eye is a cause of trouble to you, take it out, and put it away from you: it is better for you to go into life with one eye than, having two eyes, to go into the hell of fire.
DBY: And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee; it is good for thee to enter into life one-eyed, rather than having two eyes to be cast into the hell of fire.
KJV: And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire.
WEY: And if your eye is causing you to fall into sin, tear it out and away with it; it is better for you to enter into Life with only one eye, than to remain in possession of two eyes but be thrown into the Gehenna of fire.
WBS: And if thy eye causeth thee to sin, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes, to be cast into hell-fire.
WEB: If your eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out, and cast it from you. It is better for you to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into the Gehenna of fire.
YLT: And if thine eye doth cause thee to stumble, pluck it out and cast from thee; it is good for thee one-eyed to enter into the life, rather than having two eyes to be cast to the gehenna of the fire.
This why when I hear someone quote from the Bible, I kind of chuckle
If I ask them which one. Invariable, I always get the response that there is only one Bible.
There isn't. There were more versions of the Bible retranslated in the 1970's than all through out its history.
EG: "The King James Bible (for children)".
But if you actually read them, they changed things.
So I can't say, I've read King James, and it says if a child sways from Jesus, tie a rock to his neck and drown him. Mine says that. But, hopefully, thats not what it means. It means something else to me.

In the beginning, god was everything.
He existed as a union of both everything and nothing. A single entity. He existed in the form of thought.
God had no mass, energy or time as we know it. His universe was peace.
His was the universe that we would call Heaven.
This was a place where there was no movement, no beauty, no music and no pleasure.
And perfection is lonely. And god said to himself "Is this all that I am. Am I nothing more".
With one thought, god created everything we see.
With the power of a trillion suns, God exploded himself across the universe.
He created polarity.
He created mass, energy and time.
He created the living and non-living systems.
Within the non-living systems:
He encoded subsystems of memory for everything that occured to the form.
He left ways to decrypt the systems existance.
Within the living systems:
-He encoded little memory, ingnorance, the will to survive, to replicate and discover.
-He created the concepts of chaos and order, pain and pleasure, life and death.
-He divided himself into an infinite number of life forms.
-Each entity would view god from their own worlds.
-Each would record a different perspective, to help decide gods next creation.
And with these life forms that god could break the silence of perfection.
These polarities were designed to reform to recreate Gods heaven.
With everything recollected, anything that exists in the universe can be recreated.
God is learning from us. You are a part of him.
We are all the same, but we were born to be ignorant, and to be diverse.
We are here to teach God all of the unreasonable possibilites that can exist.
We are gods children, and we are here to entertain.
Given a life of immortality, given everything that exists, wouldn't you do the same thing?
--- Just a thought ----
Author: Jim Cutlar

Protestant1. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. 2. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; And showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments. 3. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain: for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain. 4. Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it. 5. Honor thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee. 6. Thou shalt not kill. 7. Thou shalt not commit adultery. 8. Thou shalt not steal. 9. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. 10. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor's.	King James Bible - Hebrew1. I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. 2. Thou shalt have no other gods before Me. Thou shalt not make un to thee a graven image, nor any manner of likeness, of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; Thou shalt not bow down unto them, nor serve them; for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate Me; And showing mercy unto the thousandth generation of them that love Me and keep My commandments. 3. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh His name in vain. 4. Remember the sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work. But the seventh day is the sabbath in honour of the Lord thy God; on it thou shalt not do any work, neither thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates; For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it. 5. Honour thy father and thy mother; in order that thy days may be prolonged upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee. 6. Thou shalt not kill. 7. Thou shalt not commit adultery. 8. Thou shalt not steal. 9. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. 10. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house; thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's. Bloch Publishing Company (1922)	Catholic1. I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt not have strange gods before me. 2. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. 3. Remember thou keep the Sabbath Day. 4. Honor thy Father and thy Mother. 5. Thou shalt not kill. 6. Thou shalt not commit adultery. 7. Thou shalt not steal. 8. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. 9. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife. 10. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's goods. Peter Gasparri, "Catholic Catechism" (1932)
Ex. 20: The First Tables of Stone (smashed by Moses)1. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before me. 2. You shall not make for yourself a graven image. You shall not bow down to them or serve them. 3. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain. 4. Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. 5. Honor your father and your mother. 6. You shall not kill. 7. You shall not commit adultery. 8. You shall not steal. 9. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. 10. You shall not covet. Adapted from Microsoft Bookshelf 98	Ex.34: The Second Tables of Stone (the words that were on the first)1. Thou shalt worship no other god (For the Lord is a jealous god). 2. Thou shalt make thee no molten gods. 3. The feast of unleavened bread shalt thou keep in the month when the ear is on the corn. 4. All the first-born are mine. 5. Six days shalt thou work, but on the seventh thou shalt rest. 6. Thou shalt observe the feast of weeks, even of the first fruits of the wheat harvest, and the feast of in gathering at the year's end. 7. Thou shalt not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leavened bread. 8. The fat of my feast shall not remain all night until the morning. 9. The first of the first fruits of thy ground thou shalt bring unto the house of the Lord thy God. 10. Thou shalt not see the a kid in its mother's milk. K.Budde, History of Ancient Hebrew Literature	Ten Punishments 1. Ex. 22:20: He that sacrificeth unto any god, save unto the Lord only, he shall be utterly destroyed. 2. Lev. 24:16: And he that blasphemeth the name of the Lord, he shall surely be put to death. 3. Ex. 31:15: Whosoever doeth any work in the Sabbath day, he shall surely be put to death. 4. Ex. 21:15: He that smiteth his father, or his mother, shall be surely put to death. 5. Ex. 21:17: He that curseth his father or his mother, shall surely be put to death. 6. Ex. 22:19: Whosoever lieth with a beast shall surely be putto death. 7. Lev. 20:13: If a man lie with mankind, as he lieth with a w-man, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death. 8. Lev. 20:10: And the man that committeth adultery with another man's wife, the adulterer and the adulteress shall be putto death. 9. Mark 16:16: He that believeth not, shall be damned. 10. Mal. 2:1-4: And now, O ye priests, this commandment is for you. If you will not hear, and if ye will not lay it to heartto give glory to my name,...behold, I will corrupt your seed, and spread dung upon your faces. Jyoti Shankar, Bubbles Online Magazine