..so maybe religion could be defined as the social right to act immorally.
Whats your personal perception of Religion ?
by thetrueone 59 Replies latest watchtower bible
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flipper
I tend to believe that most all religions are designed to control populations of people and dumb them down . I think most religions are just used as an excuse for some boorish humans to start wars and create mayhem controlling people through fear and guilt
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sabastious
Qcmbr, preach it!
-Sab
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man oh man
I would say religion is a murderer.
I would say religion is a rapist.
I would say religion is a theif.
sounds criminal to me.
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sabastious
So you wouldn't have freedom of religion. JW's couldn't practice their religion as they see fit. It would have to pass the atheistic state board.
It's pretty easy to define the Watchtower as a business in religious clothing. What Q's state does is stops them from lying to people that they are a religion and forces them to operate like the spiritual food dispensers they claim to be rather than pocket cleaners.
For example: the Watchtower says they only take "donations", but all one would have to do is observe their meetings for a short time or read ex member's literature. Then they would see that the members are guilted into giving money which, by definition, disqualifies the money exchange as a religious donation.
-Sab
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sabastious
Say a general contractor bids a job to build a house. The lumber costs $15,000 to buy from a local lumber yard. The contractor can then charge $16,500 for the lumber plus a labor wage. This is a legal markup and creates entire strain's of economic frameworks. So, for any organization that makes a profit off of "expenses" is indeed a system of monetary growth or a money-making buisness. If an organization considers themselves non-profit than every penny that is taken in, after expenses, should not be under the power of anyone inside the but in a non-personalized structure of checks and balances.
-Sab
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Qcmbr
Since the root of all society is self preservation, economics can be loosley classified as the means to allocate resources for the purposes of preserving that society and therefore all organisations that allocate resources are economic entities. Even a school or a hospital has a basic economic purpose (that's why there are so few relatively in the developing world and so many in the developed.) The mistake that society has done is to privilege religion by affording it an additional status of 'ambassador from space' and included a form of diplomatic immunity to religion , its thoughts and its practices. By collapsing this back to fundamentals and seeing religion as just another means of allocating resources (it sells hope, a social club, a choir, a social hub, in some cases medical and schooling facilities etc..) then it becomes easy to see how and why it should be classified as an economic entity, a business and as such to apply social rules (for example no one sees it as an imposition against free will to ensure that my employer has a gender equality standard, a racial equality standard and an anti-harrassment policy including a code of conduct with reagrds to gifts, bribes and confidentiality.) The modern western workplace has become highly moral, it makes good business sense.
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tec
I don't buy into the increasingly popular idea of christians that they belong to Jesus (insert favourite version of name here) and not to a religion. From personal experience its just semantics.
Well, putting it another way... there are few, if any, religions out there that would consider me a 'christian'. I don't believe hardly any (if any at all) mainstream doctrinces of Christianity, the religion. So I don't belong to 'them', and I'm not starting a new one... I belong only to Christ.
Anyway the Xians are forgetting that God organised a church all through the OT in the form of a priesthood , a set of ordinances and even a temple.
Well, I'm not forgetting that. But the temple is the Body of Christ, and those who belong to Him make up that body -whomever and wherever they happen to be; the spirit teaches (if one has an annointing of the spirit) and so those who are part of that Temple (body of Christ), need no man to teach them, because they listen to the Spirit of Truth.
That doesn't mean they can't come together and do anything, but they do what they can themselves also, in whatever way that they can. I agree though, that the best thing about churches in any religion is the charity work that they do.
Peace,
Tammy
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tec
How would you ta x a particular religion if it did not have an income?
Do non-profit organizations get ta x ed?
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thetrueone
One thing that can be confidently assumed is that religion can be used as a vehicle for good or evil.
Men using the guise of religious freedom can easily turn themselves into living powerful demi-gods controlling
people or a societal group to their liking. The recent criminal cases of certain cult leaders being charged with sexual
inappropriate behavior with under aged minors ( selective choosing girls for marriage partners ) is just one example of men making and living
by their own self devised rules. The JWs instilled promotion of self induced suicide by withholding blood transfusions, could be looked upon
as another destructively bad social behavior. Spin the arrow at just about any religion you'll usually find something bad and injurious to its
adherents. Is it because that there are men so wanting to bask in the power of their super natural deity that they are willing to put that first
and foremost in their lives and that they are more than willing to apathicaly control people who recognize this adjoining arrangement of power ?
Looking at the history of the JWS, I would say yes .