I appreciate your way of thinking and I agree with you. If people were free to think like this, violence due to religion would have subsided beyond trace.
Strange isn't it, that people who kill in the name of God cannot for a moment understand why God cannot do his own dirty work. If God wanted people to die, he could just snuff them out in a heartbeat. They never ask why he hasn't already.
God doesn’t need the help of a holy book to talk to us.
I disagree with this point. The written word is a better form of communication than oral transmission alone.....(Chinese whispers and all that.) It is also helpful to see the written form centuries after it was recorded to observe how the people of the day responded to it and how we read it now in the 21st century. The problem inherent in a holy book is deciding which holy book is actually "holy"?
Look at the activities of its followers....and I don't mean the ones who give lip service to something but clearly do not practice any of it. I include Christendom in that description. We should see a hated "few" who are doing what Christ commanded....non-violently preaching a message of peace in all the world right to the end of the present age. (Matt 24:14; John 15:18-21)
If we are God’s glorious creations, then we were born with his message- the sense morality or the inherent feeling to be/do good is our god sent message. This is something no holy books can claim – we came to know/learn about it quite sometime after we were born; for they all come from the outside. For this reason, one is/could be far more closer to God without religion than with religion.
And this would be true if we did not have a powerful adversary blurring the line between God's justice and man's.
Our inbuilt moral compass is more finely tuned with knowledge, but add the influence of another "magnetic" force and it renders the compass useless as a guide. We are all at the mercy of the "magnetic" influences from outside of ourselves. Unless we can identify and remove that force in our lives, we will remain the victims.
Religion is a multi - billion dollar business with huge political power. It if often left unchecked and it easily gets dirty - very dirty. It is the reason why some religions end up funding terrorism and violence.
Ah yes......the power trip! Left unchecked as it was for almost 2,000 years......what do we see? Men in powerful positions that God never gave them, dressed in distinctive clothes and weird hats claiming to be something they are not....adopting all manner of false religious concepts....and calling it Christianity.
Seriously.
God doesn't want someone to kill someone; it is the religion that kills.
It is men using God and religion as an excuse for violence that is the problem.
If God wants someone dead....he will do it. Who doubts that God is more than up to that task?
If God authorizes men in positions of authority to implement a penalty for breaking his law, (which he does) then the penalty is sanctioned by him. But I have never seen him sanction the death of innocents as a result of a political skirmish (with a purely political motive) or a holy war with ancient religious precepts as an excuse to behead people or to water board them, or to use torture in any form. This contravenes any normal human conscience.
We live in the 21st century and our "religion" has to move with the times whilst not contravening the original precepts of it. We can't be stuck in an ancient culture dictating actions that are now considered barbaric. War is barbaric in this day and age. There is no excuse for it and as we were instructed by Jesus to be "no part of this world", we cannot support its political agenda in any way. Jesus practised strict political neutrality when he walked the earth.....true Christians imitate him.
