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Originally posted by MarkJS
reply to post by daynight42
Ah yes... You are acting just like what I described.... Someone who wants to pick apart and deauthenticate (just made that word up)... But what is your great alternative that you live by? Please describe.
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ETA: saw on google about 10 occurrences for 'deauthenticate'... so it's not originally mine. no probs.
edit on 22/7/2012 by MarkJS because: eta
www.exminister.org...
It took me a long time to recognize the harm that religion does to a society. Even after I was convinced that the Bible was nothing but another book, I was reluctant to oppose biblically based religious beliefs. One of Nobel playwright Eugene O'Neill's greatest dramas was his Pulitzer Prize winning *Long Day's Journey into Night,* a posthumous autobiographical play about a day in the life of a family coping with the ravages of drug addiction and alcoholism. I know that evangelical Christians will resent the simile, but fundamentalist religion is like a drug. Once a person is under its influence, it works like a drug in his life. To become free of it is as difficult as any habitual user's struggle with the drug of his addiction. I consider the first two decades of my adult life as a long day's journey into light. Again, Bible fundamentalists will resent the metaphor, but I believe it is valid. Religion is a form of darkness in the individual's life; escape from it is like a journey from darkness to light. My escape was by no means easy.
The widespread acceptance of the belief that religion should enjoy privileged status has wreaked inestimable havoc on our society. It has cost the lives of defenseless children whose parents sought cures for their illnesses in prayer rather than medical science; it has brought child abuse into families indoctrinated in the biblical belief that beating the child with the rod will deliver his soul from hell (Prov. 23:13-14); it has degraded women and relegated them to subservient status in our society through nonsensical beliefs that evil was introduced into the world by a woman (1 Tim. 2:13-15) and that the divine intention is for the man to be the head of the woman (1 Cor. 11:3; Eph. 5:23); it has siphoned our energy and resources and poured them into the maintenance of church buildings and pastorates rather than enterprises that would truly benefit mankind; it has retarded educational progress by its resistance to the teaching of sex education and scientific principles in conflict with fundamentalist beliefs; it has left psychological scars in the lives of people and in more extreme cases produced religious fanatics like Jim Jones and David Koresh. In a word, it has been a blight on our society.