I think you would be hard put to find any religion today that is not, fundamentally, barbaric. Even those preaching peace and love at the expense of human life and limb, through passive resistance against aggression, leave a lot to be desired.

Then again, if one refuses to stand up for what he supposedly believes in, what good is that belief? Well, if the belief is pure religious hokum, the worth is not much better than story-time anyway.

Faith to the end -- still results in an end, not necessarily a continuance. For a continuation, a faith must be preached, taught, and, far more importantly, it must be learned.

In the news
Thanks to advances in the Worldwide Web, news events from around the globe bombard us daily. There was a time, just a few years ago, when you could spend whole hours without any news input. Today, news is a 24/7 business -- and freely, easily accessible. And some of this news simply blows the mind.

There are many today who find the gathering forces of the real world (i.e., information availability [“who did what when” plastered all over the web, as well as personal data such as SSNs, bank accounts, phone numbers, & addresses], technology in general [www & communications, PCs & mainframes, weapons systems, a car that talks to you], nanobiology in particular [DNA/RNA research, cloning, nanites, nanobes, touching some god’s building blocks of life itself]) too much to take in, so they revert to the fantasies various religions freely, or greedily, offer. It's a good excuse not to learn the sciences. A good excuse to halt industrial progress. A good excuse to kill a brother, or to die at the hands of an aggressor -- all for the sake of some mythical god, and a paradise that simply does not exist.

That God is here on Earth with Us is not the problem, because He is. The problem is identifying the fact that We are that God -- that We are the Supreme Being. We are here to become God, and so very many would rather that responsibility fell to someone else -- and there really is no one else.

It’s all so pointless,
Dan