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bouzane on 19 June 2012
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richardhutnik said:
EdHieron said:
richardhutnik said:
Chris Hu said:
In my book all organized religions are cults.

In a general sociological sense, that is true, along with any collective philosophical school of thought, that has followers and common practices that make it unique:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult

Now, if one wants to start saying that the negative associations with the word "cult" apllies to all major religions, that is subject to MUCH debate.


Well, when you look at the history of all major religions in the Western World which is basically the same thing as the history of all major cults in the Western world, there are definite reasons to apply negative associations to them.  How many people did the Catholics and the Protestants kill from the beginning of the Inquisition to the end of the witchcraft craze and today how many people have they denied their rights by playing a major role in trying to stop women from being able to get abortions and by keeping gays from being able to get married?

<b>Considering that Marxism was the single greatest ideology of death during the 20th century, and due to population size, ended up causing more deaths than religions beliefs in other centuries combined</b>, I am not going to say it is religion that did it.  Apparently, there is something that happens when you combine any ideology with government, that causes mass death and other horrors.  This should be expected, since the role of government is to act as collective coersion against its population, for the greater good.

In regards to abortion, the other side, if you want to pay attention, is that abortion takes a human life.  That is the argument.  You go down a big huge long line of arguments involving the meaning of viability and so on.  If you don't want to think or understand this, it looks merely like there is a desire to make life difficult for women.  The desire to block homosexual civil unions comes out of evangelicals who can't even figure out how to get married, so their collective guilt needs to get channeled somewhere.  And I say it this way, because the calling it marriage is part of the reason why it also gets blocked.  Idea is for homosexuals who want the full benefits of marriage, to get those benefits, not to suddenly cause people who think marriage is this, to change their definition of what they think marriage is.  If I had my druthers, I would have everything called marriage today, in civil courts relabelled "Civil Unions" by the way, and leave people calling it marriage on a personal level.

Care to provide numbers to back up your absurd statement about Marxism? Also, if the actions of Stalin are to be blamed on Marxism then why not blame atrocities such as the Vietnam war on Capitalism?

A couple things about marriage. It is not and never was a Christian institution (it is currently a secular institution that allows, for example, Atheists to marry), it has been changed before (in this case, to include interracial marriage), several religious organizations support gay marriage (why are we allowed to discriminate against them?). Also, marriage was never sacred, it was simply meant to guarantee a man exclusive sexual access to his property.