On 11/7/2011 3:29 PM, HeyBub wrote:
wrote:

My feeling is it doesn't matter much what people believe.
What matters is, in practice, does
the religion cause harm or do good.

As much as I've tried to find reliable research on that,
all I've encountered are opinions, anecdotes and outright lies.

At least one religion I know of, Judaism, has no belief test; the official
Jewish position that any religion, to the degree it teaches and promotes
charity, lovingkindness, justice, mercy, and so forth is a good and holy
road to God.

Except for Mormons, of course.



(Just kidding on that last)


Yeah, but - what is the proper way to be a faithfully observant Jew? Is
it the Hasidim, who essentially spend every hour of their entire life
re-assuring God and themselves that they respect, obey, believe and
follow as literally as possible every commandment and law written in a
book that went through many centuries of oral re-telling, questionably
accurate translation into other languages and is an assembly of the
writings of many different authors - all of which were supposedly
infallibly transmitting God's words? Or is it the form of Judiasm
practiced by those in the Reconstructionist, Reform, Conservative, or
the Orthodox branches? And even in each of those, each congregation
does it's "own thing" and essentially all members of each congregation
are doing their "own thing".

There is a belief test in Judaism. It's known as the "Shema".
see: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/...ism/shema.html

My feeling is that every organized religion has beliefs, traditions, and
practices that seem irrational or worse to the non-believers in that
faith. Unless we are serious about exterminating everyone who believes
differently than we do (and it would be a boring world if all of us
agreed about everything), we're going to have to figure out a way to
live and let live.