re: #89 Nyet

The elitists who subscribe to such a notion must be living in some pretty high ivory towers, given the amounts of terrorism, bigotry and plain irrationality sanctioned by religion.

While religion is obviously not the root of all evil (as ostensibly anti-religious dictatorships show), and culture arguably plays the primary role in how one interprets religion, religion does play the role of a sponge, having once absorbed the cultural baggage of a particular century, it preserves the said baggage for a long time in a slowly mutating sacred state.

The problem is that the often poisonous ideas of centuries past inevitably seep out of the sponge. So while arguing that “culture first” and “don’t blame all religion” and “there are many different sources of evil”, maybe it should be granted that having a sponge with toxic contents to deal with is not that good in the first place.

If we create a world where everyone is fed, safe and educated, religion falls back to a fairly benign nostalgia. (Might be seeing that in modern Europe.) Until then the dirty sponge provides some shock-absorbtion.