OK Mr. Anonymous for Christ

First off, I gotta tell you that you lose credibility points when you distance yourself from your words and ideas.
Next I want to explain that I was unable to retrieve the deleted comment but Blogspot sent me an e-mail that contained you comment. You must have hit the paste button twice ‘cause the same message was on there back to back. What I’m going to do is paste and dissect your comment. I hope you don’t mind but I will answer your questions. (Note, your words are in purple, mine in green.)

Firstly I would like to apologize for my abrupt comment above...but in response to your returning comment I would like to say;

Apology accepted.

What is religion? Religion is to have faith or belief in a supernatural power. In this case relgion is a belief in God or a god since there are many religions.
According to the dictionary religion is:
1 a : the state of a religious
b (1) : the service and worship of God or the supernatural
(2) : commitment or devotion to religious faith or observance
2 : a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices
3 archaic : scrupulous conformity : CONSCIENTIOUSNESS
4 : a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith”
When I use the word I understand it to mean the following: 1b(1), 1b (2), 2 (except that I don’t understand religion to be a personal set – I call that personal ethics.), & 4

I believe that you have taken Matthew 6:15 out of context. The interpretation of these verses do not mean that Jesus frowned on those who went to the temple. When Jesus was just a mere twelve years old He Himself went to the temple and sat and listened, taught and shared the Word of God to His own elders, those of whom were priests and great teachers. (Luke 2:46)
Speaking of taking quotes out of context, every Jewish young man goes through the experience that you describe. Luke was a Greek so maybe he didn’t know that what he was describing was Jesus’ Bar Mitzvah, the ceremonial transition into adulthood that all Jewish adolescents go through. Maybe he figured that his audience needed the description because they were unfamiliar with Jewish traditions. My Jewish friends say that memorizing scriptures in Hebrew is a very stressful part of the tradition.
I realize that the Gospels are the arguments that are used to prove that Jesus was supernatural but it takes more than a Bar Mitzvah to turn a man into a god.

Matthew 6:15 does mean that Christians should keep their religion to themselves. Quite the contrary, it is saying that we should not go out into the world proud, thinking that we are better than others and boasting of our faith. But instead it calls us to "Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit." (Matthew 28:19 and 20)
You must have meant that Matthew 6:15 does not mean what I said it means. By the way, I said nothing about keeping religion to themselves. What I was trying to say is that Jesus was disdainful of institutionalized religion. You don’t need a priest or a church to pray. If Jesus meant to say what you’re saying why didn’t he say so? Did Matthew misquote him? Was Jesus so inept at speaking that when he meant to say we should go out it somehow came out sounding like going inside a room and closing the door? Be careful brother anonymous, it sounds like you’re trying to tell me that you know better than Jesus how we should handle our spiritual lives. Just ‘cause you say it’s so doesn’t make it so.
Correct me if I’m wrong about this but the way I learned it in school the Puritans (who were Christians) left England because of religious persecutions. Last I heard, the Anglican Church is a Christian religion and they controlled religious life in England during those times. Their cruel persecution drove the Pilgrims to set out for a new land where they could be the persecutors. Do the so-called witch hunts in Salem tell you anything about Christian intolerance of other religions?
Surely you haven’t forgotten the bloody religious strife that raged in Ireland for the better part of the second half of the last millenium. I’m trying to say this respectfully but you’re either trying to mislead me or else you’re woefully uninformed about the history of Christianity.


Christ is calling us to go out into the world and tell others about Him...not keep it is the quiet of or rooms.

True Jesus lost His tmper in the temple. It says in Mark 11:15 that "He cast out those who were moneychangers and selling goods." and that He would no longer allow goods to be carried throughout the temple. In verse 17 He says, "My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations...but you have made it a robbers den." - Again this scripture about the temple has been taken out of context. It has nothing to do with Jesus "frowning" upon going to the temple or any house of the one true God to worship.
When you refer to your god as “the one true god” you’re doing what you say, in this very comment, that we shouldn’t do “proud, thinking that we are better than others and boasting of our faith.” You’re right about one thing, “frowned on” is too weak a euphemism for the way JC behaved in the Temple. He exploded in righteous indignation at the hypocrisy and the corruption of the religious establishment. The other thing is that if God is truly omnipresent where is the need to go to a so-called house of God. The other invention that the religious bureaucracy has imposed upon the faithful is the whole tithing thing. That’s why they want you in their building, so they can separate you from your money.
Now what you said about bureaucrats who degenerated a spiritual movement into the kind of religiosity that led to the inquisitions and the many bloody battles between Catholics and Protestants. Has also been slightly misrepresented. When you say that the Holy Wars brought on by Christians that was to protect thier faith, the living Word of God. When you talk of the ostensibly to bring the infidels to Christ... that was the Pope who coveted the 'amount' of Islamic people and other such things. The persecutions and threats that you talk about to force people to believe in catholocism was wrong and i totally agree with you on that. (Huh?) But when you imply that it was the Christians who did that to people who already had their own beliefs, I cannot agree with you. There has been no time recorded in history that people of the Christian faith have others to believe and practice a certain faith.
That last sentence lost you a boatload of credibility points. Check out the reign of Henry VIII in England, and his son, Edward VI. You either ignore or don’t know about the way Christianity (this was just before the Protestant reformation so it was really just one Christian church, falling apart from it’s own corruption.) conquered the Incas. Lies were used in the furtherance of insatiable lust for gold and silver. It’s a truly dark and reprehensible chapter in the history of the heavily religious Christian Europeans. Remember this was at the same time as the Inquisitions; all of Christendom was soaked in blood. See this account of the 30 Years War.
It has been the Christians who have been persecuted, and still are persecuted.
Yeah and it’s still Christian on Christian in a number of places, i.e. Ireland and Latin America. The Protestants hate the Catholics who, in turn, hate the Evangelicals and they all are contemptuous of the LDS.

Please, expound on what you mean when you say, "Critical thinking is anathema to religious faith.
I may have used the wrong word for what I wanted to say. It would have been more precise to say that critical thinking is antithetical to religious faith. Faith and analysis are polar opposites. Faith means believing, critical thinking means analyzing. My religious friends have little patience when I start questioning dogma. “Some things you just have to take on faith" is a favorite refrain But we both know that’s bullshit, don’t we?