Organized Religion is the best business humans ever created, but its execution, no pun intended, was the worst thing for mankind.
Religion should be simple. You and God (or gods if you believe in more than one) do NOT need an intermediary driving up in a Rolls Royce to yell at you like a rock star, taking your money, and making up whatever they want, as they drive up TV audiences.
You do not need someone who can be an ex-Nazi one day and suddenly become infallible the next day. You don’t need someone who does not give advice on how to be a better human being but on what country to label the Great Satan. You do not need clerics with bad breath, worse personal hygiene, and worst demagoguery, yelling on loudspeakers five times a day on the need to go kill others instead of trying to work hard to solve corruption and crime in your own society.
Most major monotheist religions were PROGRESSIVE revolutions at their time of being founded. They literally all brought down major empires not by the power of their semi-automatic weapons, but by living great lives and setting wonderful examples which others wanted to emulate. It is a tragedy these same religions now attract the least intelligent, or at least the least free-thinking, kind of people in every part of the globe.
Here is one way to look at it. The stories in the holy books were to illustrate good things in simple terms that people of that time could understand. Can you imagine Prophets Moses or Jesus or Muhammad trying to explain to people of their times the history of the universe in terms of the Einstein’s equation, or the size of the universe in light-years, and it being billions of years old?
The tragedy is that the self-styled "true" believers of all of these major religions (and others too) today take the 1500-5000 years old words as LITERAL. There are people who insist the world is 5000-10,000 years old. There are people who will insist with a straight face that the moon was split in two, just like the river was parted at one man’s command, and so much more.
All of them do this instead of doing what is needed. People can progress with the times but still remain true to the real ideals and ideas, which were the foundations of the religions. Of being good, doing good, not stealing, not killing, etc. and making the world a better place. That part people in almost every religion tend to ignore and would rather bomb someone for their religion, burn someone else alive for theirs, or behead others for theirs. Shame. Shame. Shame.
If all these Prophets could come back for a day with their swords, or whatever tool they preferred, I would like to think that the first group they would behead (or castrate {wink}) would be these false prophets in all the religions -- whether those who burned 'witches' at the stake or today's mega pastors or pedophile Christian priests; or the rabid Zionist Jew occupiers of holy lands burning Palestinian families alive; or the sons of satan of ISIS murdering and beheading innocent people (from other religions but ironically mostly killing Muslims!), for political power in the name of Islam.
Shame and all of God’s and all gods’ curses on these evildoers all. Let the good people of the world believe what they want to believe, without needing special agents of God. Let them live and let live, not needing to feel as if they have the one true answer or that it is somehow their job to judge everyone else, or to “save” their souls, sometimes by killing them, as all major religions have done!
Holier than thou hypocrites, Go F..., I mean, go save yourselves!
Let humankind live and love in peace and harmony. Amen.
