maybe it's freedom from the same thing -- the question. before becoming religious (i assume) one questions the truthfulness of that religion. before leaving a religion, i guess the same question would be there: "is this for real?". in both cases, the question is a big deal because it has a large impact on your life and your eternal life (whether you're accepting eternal life or deciding there is none), and that places a large burden on the person. so what i'm hypothesising is, perhaps this 'freedom' is just a freedom from that question, and not the religion itself?
at the same time, some religions do have a lot of restrictions and it could be considered 'freedom' to be released from those. or, i guess, becoming part of a religion with lots of rules and restrictions 'frees' you from having to make some decisions for yourself.
maybe it's a mix of both.
Interesting point, definitely something that makes sense to me.
Why are you so quick to defend your side, especially in a thread like this? Do you actually believe your side has NO disadvantages and you're living the PERFECT way a person can live? Like, your way of life is actually the best way for someone to live and you're just lucky enough to have found it? Cause that's what a Way without any disadvantages mean..
I don't think it's so much as defending our or someone else's side 'just for the sake of it' here, it's more that ideal worlds in practice do not really exist... but we try to compare to our own world views anyways. As an inevitable result, we encounter problems.
It has also a bit to do with disadvantages as disadvantages really can be found everywhere. I think saying 'there are no disadvantages in my way of living' is quite a big claim, I think it's contradictory to the fact of not really being able to live up to 'the examples' actually.
Without religion, there's no burden of living up to anything, you have the freedom to take things the way you like. Personally I think that has more advantages than disadvantages, but that's all that can be said about it. It doesn't really mean our 'truths' are just choices, but I think most of us (us as in non-religious (relativist) people) would agree that knowledge is relative and therefore truth is not absolute, so... what's the point of claiming truth about something anyways...
Life is a discovery of knowledge and having lots of fun while doing so, at least that's the main thing that makes it so interesting to me,
it's like the Crusades -- trying to use Christianity as a reason to war against Muslims, but discriminatory war in itself is un-Christian. so what i'm saying is, these 'Muslim extremists' aren't necessarily serving a 'greater good' based on their continued existence, because they aren't a part of Islam which must be part of the 'greater good' since it still exists, but are just an offshoot of humanity's inherent aggression and intolerance. having said that, it could be said that humanity's inherent aggression and intolerance have survived so long and therefore must be part of this perfect balance.
If something is perfect, it really means everything is totally out of any kind of balance. After all there's only "perfect".
I don't think you can wave away the aggression you've talked about as some kind of annoying but inevitable side-effect of fundamentalist religions though. You have to see that without religions, these warmongers would have less of a motive to start their evildoing of spreading their anti-whatever propaganda,
Cheers
