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Old 09-04-2012, 07:07 AM   #41 (permalink)
Blitzgal
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Join Date: Feb 2006
Location: Madison, WI
Posts: 3,294
Quote:
Originally Posted by rodimusprime View Post
Some times I'm scared if you get rid of religion we'll be faced with an even scarier truth... that people just believe this bigoted nonsense not BECAUSE of religion but in spite of religion. I'm not sure it's religion that makes people racist, homophobic of xenophobic. I feel like it comes from somewhere even deeper than that and religion is just an easy way of explaining it and not feeling like it's "your fault."

I agree with you. If religion disappeared tomorrow, human beings would just devise some other social tool to categorize and separate each other into "teams." Tribal mentality is the nasty underbelly of our survival instinct. We obsessively try to identify who is "one of us" and who is "one of them." I'm not justifying it -- it leads to a lot of bloodshed and terrible things. But religion is just one arbitrary tool that we use to do it. We'd come up with something else if religion didn't exist.
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