Do You Believe In God?

[cladking]

I agree it's a fascinating subject - and eloquently put.

However, I cannot help but object to your comment:

Ancient religions made far more sense and allowed a great deal of individual variation in beliefs.

This really is crazy. Ancient religions allowed the lucky few to exercise power of life and death, command whole life-times and life-styles of their peoples and any 'variation' of belief was dealt with severely. We know this from Ancient manuscripts.

Surely you cannot believe your (earlier?) premise? Was that crap spouted from the programme you just watched?

Yes, the rich, powerful, and well born walked all over everyone just like modern day America but they didn't do it in the name of religion mostly. Apparently the priests were well taken care of as well but these weren't religious positions like they are now. These guys didn't go out and try to convert people but did the nuts and bolts work of trying to understand nature. This meant reading, copying, and writing books as well as observing what went on. The Egyptian word for "God" was "neter" and this might be the origin of the word nature.

I don't believe that people were crucified for their beliefs until after religion became big business. Before that many people may not have even taken the Gods all that seriously yet no one was offended. Everyone still used the same terminology even though beliefs varied somewhat. In Egypt each city sponsored a different God and it seemed perfectly natural (or neteral).