I know sometimes people think I am having a go at religion, but people are free to believe what they want to believe.

I think the only real benefit to be obtained from religion is a sense of comfort. 'Maybe I'm poor now, but in the next life, it won't be so bad'. I look at countries like the Phillipines, and I have no doubt Catholicism is a comfort to many people who live in abject poverty. Yet at the same time, the Catholic church is abusive with its stance on contraception. Instead of helping in that regard, it encourages further povert in that country. That is sick behaviour when it wouldn't be so hard to genuinely help the poor with a bit of commonsense.

Nothing that organised religion claims to do is anything that any human couldn't or doesn't do without religion. Most of us just get on with life doing the best we can. Few are doing anything truly terrible and if they are then society balances them. If one is walking around being 'good' because they are worrying about the permanent CCTV that is God, then they were likely never particularly good to begin with and that probably came from bad parenting.

Instead of encouraging poverty and saying it will be better in the land beyond, how about giving up that wealth and putting it all back into society? All that extravagance at Christmas makes the Pope seem like a middle age Monarch. If there was a Jesus, he was an odd man too. He supposedly said something along the lines of if you don't hate your parents, your children, your wife, yourself, then you cannot be my disciple. Now that really is a bit mean and most of us from todays perpective would say you are the definition of modern cult leader. A lot of myths about that man though and they are mostly myths.

P.S. My hiatus shall thus commence.