xSlyPandax

Don't you think it'd be more noble and noteworthy if we could possibly manage to live and deal with religion, instead of just giving up on it? Religion has too many roots - it's part of how we came to be. I think we should work on what's already here and stand up to the problem instead of starting from scratch, giving up and turning our back on human history.

Damn. This is the most conservative I've ever felt I think!

"Great article. I think religion should be abolished though. Causes too much trouble."

Might as well abolish fatty foods...Fatty foods kill more american's than terrorists.

Sweeping something under a mat is not going to make it go away.

It's like the Sly Panda was doing a little trolling of his own...




I was also going to comment earlier about one of Dingo's comments.

"The bible as a whole wasn't really against war. I think it was necessary to have a violent God, and a passive (son of) God in order to broaden the Christian religion's marketability." -Dingo

That is a very generalistic and broad comment. You blur the lines from old to new testament. There is an old and a new covenant. Maybe if you actually read the bible you would be more aware of the difference between the OT and the NT.

"That is because you fall into Category A, rather than Category B. Re-read my post. Deuteronomy 17:2-5 states you should kill non-christians (by stoning them to death), and you are not doing that." -Dingo

Here again...I am reminded of something I read the other day in 2 Peter...He talks about how Paul's letters to fellow Christians would be read by ignorant people and distorted them as they do other scriptures (ie old testament theology) to their own destruction. The actual verses come from 2peter3:16-18 NIV.

"You're actually more biased than I am. I'm agnostic, not atheist. Where I try to see things from every perspective, you are willfully ignorant in the philosophical sense as demonstrated here: "even if there is something in there, i cant trust u, because your mind is so against Christianity"" -Dingo

Well, maybe you should do some more research before you quote such a big book. Your comments are very opinion based and not theologically based. Have you even read my comments on your post that you did about morality and religion? You might learn a few things if you actually go back and read them.

"You wont even CONSIDER something that goes against your idea of what Christianity SHOULD be. Don't lecture me about my beliefs, and in the same breath tell me not to worry about other peoples beliefs. Damn hypocrite." -Dingo

Not everyone is 'lecturing' you, just informing you of their opinion. I'm not calling you stupid or dumb, but maybe you are not always right.

Why the fuck do you bother Scienott.
Religion. Ha.
Were all walking corpses.
Some of us just don't realise were dead yet.
Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Lets bury religion and get back on the bus.

EVERYONE, DONT CARE WHAT RELIGION YOU ARE.
IF I DONT KNOW YOU PERSONALY, I PROBABLY DONT WANT TO.
SO FUCK OFF. END OF.

I have this "|" much time for People.
Murder who the fuck you like for me.
Pakis, nigers, white people, spics, jews...
Whatever you want.

If you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, thats your own stupid fucking fault. Shit happens, people die. There isnt any God, you turn to dust and if your lucky that dust makes it into "something" else. So stop being pussies and falling back on stupid fuck-eyed ideas like religion. Whats up, are you cowards the whole fucking lot of you.

Only cowards believe in something other than themselves.

Get over it.

You lot do know few of "Christian" holidays were originally Pagan ones.

I felt like writing the following to a newspaper but they'l never do it as its too long and they rather write about unimportant stuff anyway. Anyway it appliues to the uk so here goes:

I am sick and tired of politicians using the word "democracy" to justify their own personal means (as well as having the uncanny knack of never being able to give a straight yes or no answer), and most of which revolves around their greed for money, and oppressing not just people on other lands, but its own people too, hard to believe maybe.

In the old days slavery involved pharaohs living off the sweat and toil of its slaves, whipped by the slave masters. These days the sweat may have gone, replaced by the taking of minds and money of its own people to such an extent that the people themselves will be the first to defend it, and instead of slave masters we have job centre officials, the police, council and other civil service agencies, to keep the rest of us in check (although they may argue otherwise and I accept that, we are all entitled to an opinion), some profiting from the misery of the poor such as the justice system and police (lets face it rich people barely need to resort to crime although there is no excuse for it), and others from our pay-packets.

Let's see how many councillors still want to keep their jobs if their pay was taken away, after all, should the fact that they are helping the public not mean that the hearts of our representatives are so noble they want to help fellow humans without expecting a reward? Millions of volunteers work selflessly in this country helping to make it a better place, why can the same not be applied to them? Eliminating the incentive for corruption, personal greed or power, which is money.

Yet only recently do they disclose the expenses they claim from public funds, often taking the full amount available. If we truly had a say would we all want this money to be paid? We have benefit system agents allowed to intrude into peoples' homes without owners allowed to have a say. Their job (let us be honest) is to look for evidence to help take food off the peoples tables they visit. "But cheats need investigating, it is our money!" I hear you cry. Let us be clear. First of all, innocent until proven guilty used to be the case and there is no reason why it shouldn't be the case here. No matter what the reason YOU or anyone else for that matter would not like anyone access to your home without your consent. Why is it ok to happen to someone else? Surely ordinary people could just as easily visit the government agencies just like any regular appointment. People think about ID cards when privacy is affected but privacy as well as dignity is already being intruded upon.

This is the same way we go intruding into other peoples countries.

Take Iraq for instance. Our esteemed US colleagues armed Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War many years ago, therefore profiteering from selling weapons, helping them destroy each other, Then we went on to embargo Iraq for 10 years making no one suffer except its citizens like you or me, death by remote control of inhabitants of another country (essentially cutting it off from world trade), then go on to invade it on pretences somehow linking it to September the 11th. Then Iran is on the cards.

Did the millions of citizens of Iraq not suffer enough already both from Saddam and later from his one time friends? Why should an entire country be allowed to be blitzed just for the actions of one man? (the same actions from which a blind eye was turned just because he was friendly to us when the acts were actually committed). What logic justifies bombing entire countries for one persons actions? Same goes with today's interpretation of what a leader is. What do leaders do? They are supposed to lead people, yet our modern concept of a leader seems to mean lead from the back, putting others in front. You may say but the safety of leaders is vital. Well if they choose to be leaders and believe so strongly in their cause then it may be reasonable to believe they should have the moral fortitude to lead by example and willing to personally get involved in their decisions rather than just pointing fingers for other people to do their bidding, I should not have to be saying this, they should already be doing this without people having to point this out. If these politicians truly believe in God then there is no way any decent person can imagine God giving these people any kind of right over other human beings lives and then justifying destruction.

Then there is the "veto" system, wielded mainly by white European superpowers, effectively making a mockery of democracy, marginalising the opinion of the rest of the world. And now, there are no pretences about the intentions with Iran. Hang on lets look at the evidence. Has Iran or Iraq ever invaded us in the past hundreds of years or tried bombing us? Why would they do it now then? Have they embargoed us? Have we done anything to upset them though? Using political blackmail against other nations with embargos for instance or not class them as friends, maybe calling them evil for some reason? Have we given them reason not to like us? And most importantly of all let us look at even more facts. Which is the only country in the world to have used nuclear weapons on others? Oh it's the USA of course with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Talk about double standards. And we go around calling other countries evil etc.

Let us move onto the next big issue we see on the news every day without fail. The creation of a country to accommodate a sole religion on other peoples land (akin to apartheid Africa) through the help of, initially British and then American politicians around 50 years ago on other peoples back yard, who had no say in this at all, another example of self righteous attitudes of the leading nations towards the rest of the planet. I am of course, referring to Israel. Yet then going on to call the Palestinians "Terrorists" for the next coming decades for losing their homes to Israel and popularising this phrase against Muslims. Incidentally is it a coincidence we only seem to be interested in countries with oil but no nuclear weapons YET? or countries deemed "soft"?

Has anyone ever stopped to wonder what your personal worth is? Over a lifetime, even when you have paid worked hard all your life and paid off your mortgage (by which time some of us will be too old to enjoy it from what is left of life), you still have to pay council tax (a lifetime mortgage), maybe over a thousand pounds a year, totalling maybe £80,000 over your lifetime, a conservative estimate. And what benefit do we get from this? Street lighting, a road repaired every 10 years, schools choosing to employ teaching assistants rather than qualified teachers, hospitals with 4 hour waiting times, charging for parking for a health system already funded by our taxes with insufficient nurses, having to leave our empty bins at the end of our streets so that thieves have a single, easy access point to rummage through the rubbish to find bank details and other such information to commit fraud, as well as doing half the bin-mens job. What other benefits do we see from our council tax? Oh yes! The 2 annual fireworks display we all adore, our money going up in flames, literally. Ironically we wouldn't be so enthusiastic if currency was actually burnt. I actually believe each and every one of us is just a currency figure on an accountants balance sheet just like an asset, in the grand scheme of things. Try and work out your contribution and compare it against where you can see the money spent.

The incredible mortgage system basically enslaves us to debt for most of our lives to the banks, who make almost double the money they lend us on most occasions. It may seem incredible to imagine how much power banks have over our lives, yet our homes belong to the banks and building societies until the debt is paid off, usually near the end of the road for most people. They throw credit cards and loans at us charging interest to profit from people who don't have money in the first place, yet they are quick to send penalty fees when accounts are overdrawn. In the same ironic way, it is legal to sell cigarettes, yet fines can or will be soon imposed on smokers, creating a two-pronged system to make money from the same people. Despite the incredible amount of money collected by the government, access to university has become difficult for all but the ones who need university least, the rich, putting the rest of us in more debt before our first step into the working world.

As well as council tax, the hardworking citizen has to pay maybe a fifth of their wages in tax, a staggering 90% on fuel (if an alien visited us I'm sure it would be amazed), a shocking 90% on cigarettes, mandatory car insurance (I don't see why it should be forced upon us if solicitors get involved anyway in the event of an accident and the likely hood of a payment from our pockets at the time of such an incident would most likely be far less paying personally than all the premiums paid to insurers over a lifetime), the VAT charged on nearly every financial transaction that takes place by each of us every time you buy most items, road tax, MOT, corporation tax from companies and licenses from shops and vehicles ( I'm actually shocked the government is not making far more than BT in its monopoly heydays). The cost of running a car can sometimes almost equal the cost of running a house, doubling our woes based on expense. Then there are the hordes of parking attendants, police and cameras in every town centre. The attendants and police waiting like vultures to pounce on as yet innocent drivers already hard hit by the governments undeclared war on motorists and now effectively making criminals of ordinary civilians instead of focusing on actual real crime, the criminal minded. Who pays for all this? Us.

There seem to be two kinds of robbers, the ones in the street who are living in enough misery to rob each of us a fifty pounds maybe if we are unlucky enough in a lifetime, and the other is this lavish government with its multitude of legal rackets taking large fractions of our money, and no doubt new plans are being innovated as I write to take more.

We are given an illusion of choice as regards political parties, each being as bad as the next one, yet deep down we all know there is no choice, the next ones will take more than the previous and the cycle of misery for our people repeats itself again and again. Whether it is Conservative, Labour or any other party, there really is no difference. Even in opposition they may appear to be trying hard and gives a sense of an alternative and an underdog present, but let's face it, none of them are poor and we pay for their living. We hear about sleaze from politicians, presumably fairly wealthy and having enough not have to have to resort to such deviant malpractice, then the next thing you know the disgraced person returns from the wilderness to fulfil a different role and the matter is soon forgotten. The rest of us would never get a second chance in a job situation. On the other hand, criminals, often from poverty stricken parts of society are left with a life long stamp on their criminal records in applying for jobs, minimising their chances of re-integrating into society and weeding them out from being able to apply for most decent jobs. Let us be honest with ourselves, we live in the real world and it would take a brave employer (considering the amounts of background checks they do to cover their own backs) to give a well paid or respectable job to a person with a criminal record, much as some people would beg to differ.

I am not saying checks should not be done or all criminals should be employed, obviously the far more serious crimes should be dealt with accordingley, but simply the fact the current system is a hindrance for people wanting to make a change for the better in their lives, and I would argue it keeps such people in a vicious circle, ask anyone about the percentage of people who re-offend. I would also argue most people would want to work if they could. No well paid person would ever stop working to embark on a career in burglary. Obviously far more serious offences are important and need to be recorded but for lesser offences, the answer is to raise the standards of living as a community rather than stamping people as criminals for an entire lifetime and eventually, the cycle repeating itself.

The role of civil servants is to serve the public, yet some have to sign a secrets act, secrets kept from the public ironically, which in all fairness is good in the protection of public data, yet at the same time it can also be used to keep whistleblowers from speaking whenever government wrongdoing occurs.

If Britain was a company, quite frankly, we would be bankrupt. Despite the large amounts of money used to run this country from the backs of each and every one of us, we are still millions, perhaps billions in debt with the World Bank thanks to the way the politicians use our money (I don't bother with statistics). Paying for white elephants like the Millennium Dome, Diana's Waterfall and new Parliament Buildings yet only having themselves to answer to (I can never imagine truly independent enquiries into any government affair by nature of the people they appoint to hold these enquiries), without any verbal input from the people actually paying for all this, us.

We have farmers subsidised by tax payers money because there is no chance they can compete with developing countries who sell the same goods at a fraction of the cost in our supermarkets compared to farmers here with high labour costs, yet we block the poor countries out with our EU and UK trade barriers and laws to keep them poor and protect our bankrupt economy. We can finance wars abroad with billions of tax payers money because we now have a problem with one man, and finance the exquisite lifestyle of the Royals but cannot even afford a dentist here, or a doctor or a good school. We have laws that protect thieves and penalise the people who make a stand in their own homes, almost to the point where it feels more lawful to allow your selves to get robbed.

We have police actually killing people, brutalising people in custody or allowing death in at least 4 separate instances (the Brazilian man in London, a man carrying a table leg mistaken for a shotgun several years ago in London, Omar Rafiq the asian man from Manchester who lost his eye to police beatings in the back of their van, and the Black man in their custody mocked at whilst dying recently shown on the news), yet they always seem to be cleared of any wrongdoing by our highly trained judiciary far more experienced in legal matters than the lay man. Is it not strange that despite the small percentage associated with people of ethnic origin living in this country, 3 of the 4 above famous cases involve people of foreign ethnic origin? I cannot think of many instances of Police brutality or killing against many whites in the UK. It is one rule for them and another for the rest of us. It also seems easier to target the motorist (and more profitable) than real criminals.

In the same way, is it coincidence most countries we seem to have a problem with are mainly non-white, of middle eastern origin on the whole these days, our best friends seem to be white western countries, and the rest are either too difficult to contemplate confronting such as Korea, or have no monetary or oil value such as Africa apart from the taking of their resources, and I'm not just talking diamonds in Africa, but encouraging the educated amongst them who were nurtured in their own countries to bring their skills here away from where they are desperately needed, because we have a shortage of doctors and nurses, stopping them giving back what little was given to them.

We brush off religion (which mostly teaches humility and kindness) and its values as being old fashioned and out of date, favouring a more self-centred materialistic atheist approach to life which eats away at the moral fabric of society, yet we pour millions of our taxes annually in an undemocratic unelected medieval monarchy system, without as much as a sigh or an option to opt out of paying for this pomp in the middle of a supposedly democratic civilisation. The few attempts at actual working like the rest of us by the royal family (using tax payers' money) have resulted in disaster in the past, most notably a television company set up by member of the royal family. Even if they stopped receiving this money they would still be wealthy even if they had to live ten lives over.

The flourishing of agencies have added to the misery of this country in the past decade and to me seems to be a sign of today's economic decay, robbing workers of job security and decent pay, lowering morale and generally lowering the standard of living, redirecting the peoples fortunes and prospects to business, further increasing the gap between the rich and the poor. Talking of agencies, I mentioned slavery at the start. One thing I was unaware of is that if a company is happy with an agency worker and actually wishes to take the person on, they can sometimes "buy" the worker from the agency, in some cases for several thousand pounds.

A quick word on social issues, Most of us are so engrossed in the pursuit of money that women are nowadays leaving it longer to have children and sometimes choose one at the eventual expense of the other. This shows how much the financial situation of most of us affects our lives to the very core. Most of us start work and finish work before or after our kids go to school, a clear problem for most people yet we tolerate it because it is an accepted part of life now. We have children growing up where parents may have been able to have a stronger bond with their parents but money prevents them from doing so or is a hindrance. We have old people who have paid their taxes all their lives putting this country where it is at today, living in poverty. We thank them for standing us on our feet by putting them in homes or they do it themselves, often funded by selling their own, going to homes where sometimes there are no standards or regulations and staff are paid the basic minimum the employers can get away with.

We have charities that have to give a red nose or a badge as an incentive to donate for their causes.

It seems a shame that money is being used to make some peoples lives harder at the benefit of others and there is so much deceit and dishonesty when money is involved.

Before someone says move to another country if you're not happy then let me say this. The so called "illegal immigrants" are vilified and some people may feel some kind of negativity towards them. Yet what actually is wrong with them? They want a better life just like the rest of us and which we already take for granted, yet we choose to deny them basic living standards, we cannot even begin to address the issue unless we see them as equal humans, yet we cannot contemplate that. What is wrong with wanting a better life? The things I have mentioned about our own problems are nothing compared to the poverty these people face from their own countries. Yet with our trade laws and CAP agreements we keep them poor, refusing to let them in, or have a better life where they are. This is tyranny of the most inhumane kind It is quite clearly wrong. People in our country are actually paying money at this very minute to lose weight or having cosmetic enhancements done, whereas there are some third world countries in which people even have to eat rats to survive.

I have had my rant and no doubt I expect to be labelled as one of the usual "leftist" crackpots brushed off to make ourselves feel better about how things are, but I felt the need strongly because the real issues always seem to be side stepped conveniently each and every day and seem to have become some kind of entertainment, like yesterdays news story we all seem to forget, the same way reports of deaths of people far away on the news seem to have just become figures in our minds, not real human beings actually dying when it could/should have been prevented, because someone or some people out there have the power to do something about this. If Jonathan Dimbleby EVER received some straight answers from our politicians (one of the very few forums when politicians can be questioned) when they debate domestic or foreign issues, I would not be compelled to write this at all.

Things can only get better if it is acknowledged that a problem exists in the first place. Democracy is an excellent thing which CAN help everyone in society, but only when it is truly achieved or aimed for with genuine honesty from the heart and from people who are selfless and empathetic, instead of using it to advantage an elite few or to achieve certain aims, usually involving personal wealth. Hopefully we can do some good by recognising the problems that exist and facing them rather than pretending everything is fine and brushing uncomfortable issues under the carpet simply because they seem too much to bear. The world is not a nice place but it needs to be faced than ignored. We can each try to help make the world a better place to live in for all of us, not just our nearest and dearest.