> I'm no expert in religion making but it seems if you were creating a god or a faith you would need a motivation. What was it? And would it be worth dying for?
With respect, your questions are very niave, and indicative of a tenuous grasp of anything beyond the revisionist, Christian take on history, which seeks to paint the Church as the main civilizing thrust behind the growth of Western civilization (a view which virtually no mainstream, non-Christian scholar now regards as tenable). This is just self-aggrandising nonsense, flimsy propaganda of the kind which anyone who has studied the rise of "Uncle Joe" Stalin will be all too familiar.
Throughout history, religion has provided social cohesion, and religious myth has been the principal way in which ethical systems, forms of social organisation, traditions, rituals, alliances and emnities etc. have been encoded, and passed on through generations as unsullied truth by some centralised authority. Religion has been the toehold by which the power-hungry manipulate the needy, a powerful force for social engineering. Millions upon millions have died for numerous (equally misguided) faiths, inculcated into them from birth, unshakeable convictions in mysterious, invisible intelligences of one kind or another, in this respect no different from your Jesus or Jehovah.
Only recently, Mohamed Atta lead a group of religious fanatics - adherents of a corrupted form of Islam influenced by the socialist revolutionist thinking of Europe - into flying jumbo jets into non-military targets across the US. What was HIS motivation? If this example is too extreme for you, then perhaps you could explain the spread of traditional Islam among the many millions of ordinary, peace-loving people of the Middle East - a faith which, you simply MUST concede, is based on a Holy Book very simular in character to yours, which WAS fabricated, and which WAS successfully propagated, DESPITE the total lack of evidence to support it?
The critical tradition began in ancient Greece, and marked the beginning of the slow trawl out of religious dogma and political authoritarianism (which continued DESPITE, not because of, the oppression and censorship of the Church) which culminates in natural philosophy, modern science, democracy, and the free market. This new tradition is characterised by a desire to embrace uncertainty, to recognise that no authority has the infallible truth, to weed out and learn from our errors, to challenge, and to revise, and to extend our knowledge, and by this method to grow, and to make progress, and to be responsible for ourselves, and critical of our rulers. This is in sharp contrast to most (although not all) religious traditions, which embody the wish to return to the womb-like security of childhood, and hold to the comforting belief that Absolute Truth is accessible to some Earthly authority, a view which inevitably paves the way for authoritarian systems which seek to surpress creativity, criticism and free enquiry wherever they find it.
Paul Hayward.
