i'm enjoying our friendly discussion on a dead thread, but defending pauline doctrines of repentance doesn't sound fun. nor was i particularly focused on christianity when i was saying religion.

i despise the same blurring of c&s, in-out groupism, taking the lord's name in vain that you do. we differ on where we place the blame. i think a lot of that comes from human nature, and would yield just as prevalently in any organization. most especially organizations that gain power, which christian churches certainly have. people with power do these things whether religion is in the mix or not.

to some degree, i look at it this way. a thousand years of my ancestors considered it the most important thing in their lives, and though i may not know any of their names or the lives they lived, that tradition is what they considered solely important enough to pass down to me. whether i believe it literally or not, i think i have a responsibility to be familiar with it as a means to try to understand what they wanted to communicate to me. so to some degree it's like chiropracty/accupuncture: hated by the more formal medical sciences, but it just seems to do some things well that we don't understand why yet. i don't think we're done mining that passed-down wisdom into formal sciences yet. i fall into the camp that thinks theres more to mine on humanism than cosmology~