Religion is a disease, says Rushkoff ...

Doug Rushkoff puts it on a brilliant way on this article. Not to analyze the fairytales in Bible to utilize their truths in the real life, but on some views that are just brilliant on their own.

"Maybe I'm just getting old, but I no longer see the real value in being tolerant of other people's beliefs. "

Indeed. Why is it always that the (any) Christians don't have to be tolerant against any other non-Christians? Or in borderline, tolerate the Christians, but it is ok and acceptable to be racist against the Muslims, as they are always "all of them" terrorists.

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"When religions are practiced, as they are by a majority of those in developed nations, today, as a kind of nostalgic little ritual - a community event or an excuse to get together and not work - it doesn't really screw anything up too badly. But when they radically alter our ability to contend with reality, cope with difference, or implement the most basic ethical provisions, they must be stopped.

Like any other public health crisis, the belief in religion must now be treated as a sickness. It is an epidemic, paralyzing our nation's ability to behave in a rational way, and - given our weapons capabilities - posing an increasingly grave threat to the rest of the world. "

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"But true believers don't have this freedom. Whether it's because they need the Bible to prove a real estate claim in the Middle East, because they don't know how to relate something that didn't really happen, or because they require the threat of an angry super-being who sees all in order behave like good children, true believers - what we now call fundamentalists - are not in a position to appreciate the truth and beauty of the Holy Scriptures. No, the multi-dimensional document we call the Bible is not available to them because, for them, all those stories have to be accepted as historical truth.

Forget the fact that this is pretty much impossible to do. The Bible contradicts itself all over the place. There are even two different creation stories! (One in which Eve is created at the same time as Adam, and another where she is grown from his rib. And they're less than a page apart.) Forget that the myths of the Bible had already been understood as mythology by the pre-Biblical cultures from which many of them came. And forget that the Bible comments on its own stories, as stories, directly! On numerous occasions, the narration asks its hearers whether they get the joke. "

And this brings us back to some of David Pratt's points of view especially about religion, such as the origins of Christianity and my favorite, God and religion, and Who was the real Jesus?.

Jesus was American

Jesus was an American.
Or well, would be if he lived now.

He was chosen to be the son of God. As Christianity makes always so much sense, we would just have to assume he would be a Jew in this life as in the past one. He couldn't however have been born in Israel, since that is abroad and there are too many terrorists abroad, especially in the Middle East. And if he would be or would have been from the middle East, he would hardly look or have looked like Jesus either. Like how big chances are there that a man born in Middle East would look like Jesus that we all know from all the traditional religious paintings (looking like a Dutch or Danish woman with a beard)?

So Jesus would be, or would have had to be, naturally, an American. New York or New Jersey would be the most likely places for him to be from, since those areas are so full of Jews.

And besides, how anti-American of the God it would be to have a non-American Jesus anyway?