sleeper;1791350 wrote:1000's of years of research wasted. Why don't we just call it what it is? It's a book designed to manipulate the ignorant to extract money and influence in exchange for a promise that can never be verified because you have to die to realize your "gain".
Maybe we should allocate our resources into something more useful instead of pondering what a bunch of scam artists wrote 1000's of years ago.
This so damn much. Just go back to medieval times. You had lords and peasants. One group lived as well as possible during that era; the other lived in poverty where their lives revolved around serving their lord and could be disrupted at any time. Shit really sucked. People with sucky lives become discontented. Discontent leads to rebellion, which the bourgeois obviously doesn't want, as they hold all the cards. Therefore, "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit..." and other lines, which all basically say "Be a good serf, do what your lord says, don't complain AND THEN when your worthless pissant life ends, you'll get your reward and live in bliss in heaven for eternity!!!" And, of course, back then, you had the sort of strong and hilariously corrupt church where that sort of stuff was enforced with forceful zeal to really pound it into peoples' heads they NEED to be living a certain (subservient) way.
Religion: A man-made construct designed by the elite to keep the masses in line. Nothing more needs to be said. At least in today's world, in civilized areas, it has lost enough appeal that witch burnings, inquisitions and other activities designed to cow the masses into submission have fallen out of favor; and the worst thing a lot of normal people have to deal with is ignorant people scrambling for bible verses as a way to "confirm" their personal prejudices.
