Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Thu, 09 Jul 2009 16:21:10 -0700, Patrick Elliott wrote:
> 
>> The whole point of religion is to control people "now", in order to save
>> them "later", in some vague sense.
> 
> Well, if I were a cynic, I'd say that the point of religion is to get 
> people to believe in an afterlife and then use that belief in an 
> afterlife to control them now (by implanting fears about how they will 
> spend eternity if they don't do the things the religious leadership wants 
> them to do).  Making people think they will spend an eternity in hellfire 
> and pain will motivate people to do a lot of things.
> 
> Jim
Actually, this is relatively recent though too. It wasn't until the NT 
that hell really became defined (not surprising since it wasn't until 
then that the Judaic faith ran into the Roman/Greek concept of Hades), 
and it wasn't until Dante that the church really had more than a vague, 
"You will go to a sort of bad place!", concept of just what "bad" meant 
in context to the idea. Early Christian mythos was rather vague as to 
what happened if you sinned too badly, and basically didn't do much more 
than state, "Ah, well.. uh, I guess you just don't get to go to church 
in the big sky any more and worship god directly, at his feet.."

-- 
void main () {
   If Schrödingers_cat is alive or version > 98 {
     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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