Wow....
What a number of pages dedicated to the idea that a 3,500-to-4,000-year-old Middle-Eastern herdsmens' 'god' actually exists...
So many people have conveniently forgotten - or never realized - that if certain historical events had not taken place, or had occurred in a slightly different way, most of you would never have heard of this Middle-Eastern regional 'god'...
If you are of European descent, your ancestors were converted to Christianity by the Romans... By Roman swords, to be more accurate... The Gauls [France], Goths [Germanic], Vandals [Germanic], Britons [English], and more, were converted directly by the Romans. As the religion picked up speed, especially since certain scriptural supports for warfare conveniently ended up in the Christian Greek scriptures, other tribal groups were converted by the earlier converts - the Britons [as Christians...] conquered certain Norse groups, they conquered others and converted them to Christianity, and so on...
Which means that most of your ancestors had never heard of that Middle-Eastern 'god' until they were invaded by the Romans...
Obviously, if you are of African or Native-American ancestry, the records of your ancestors' forcible conversion to Christianity are much fresher, and that dismal record gives us a glimpse of the process that the Europeans were subjected to...
But...
If not for this chain of events, most of you would still be worshipping Thor... Danu.... Freya.... Gaia... Oya... Yemaya... And so on.
The way that some of you attempt to co-opt the OLDER religions for your junior Middle-Eastern upstart is hilarious, too - to the point that some of you even claim that the 4.5-billion-year-old earth was somehow built by this 3,500-year-old 'god', whose name doesn't even exist prior to the last 3-4 millennia...
If you only knew how you look to people who've read the scientific research available on the subjects of geology, paleontology, paleo-archaeology, anthropology, astronomy, and so on...
Religion is founded on emotionalism; science is founded upon factual logic. But the attempts of religious people to fantasize some 'factual' basis for the fairy tales in the bible is also hilarious.
To paraphrase a certain comic - how could I ever leave this board? You Christians just AMUSE me too much!!
Zid