Re: God doesnt need religion anymore

If you 'let go of' religion then the idea of God means nothing.

I disagree. Religion has traditionally been used as a control mechanism to keep the priests well empowered. That has little to do with God. In most religions, we have a case of someone coming up with some good ideas and passing them along, and subsequent folks warping the ideas and manipulating people to violate the original ideas.

Let's take a look. Judaism and Moses. Moses gives his people (divinely inspired or not) guidelines on how to strive to be better, how to live more peaceful lives, and he kept the idea of a Creator. And then the history of Judaism, even including the stories of Moses, is replete with instances of Jews finding any and every excuse possible (often because some "prophet" told them that this is what God wants) to violate the spirit of "strive to be a better person". "God", as such, is confused with an ancient "god of jealousy" and depicted as the most heinous sonofabitch imaginable.

Or how about Christianity and Jesus. "Hey, guys, how about loving each other and treating each other with respect." QUICK! KILL HIM! And then century after century of "loving" each other by killing each other (to say nothing of the penalties for being an unbeliever), ignoring the message and elevating the messenger to God, worshipping the messenger and arguing that believing in the messenger is the important thing.

Or how about Buddhism and Buddha. Again, we have another man with a few good ideas about how to strive to better one's self, and again, we have some of the goofiest corruption ever to see the light of day as the religion progressed (but I'm not aware of wholesale attempts at genocide as with Christians or Jews, so they get props for that). Like Christians believe that believing in Jesus is the way into Heaven, (a lot of) Buddhists believe in "Boddhisatva", an enlightened soul that "holds open the way" to Nirvana, and instead of following the path (or heeding the messenger's advice), they instead worship the Boddhisatva or the Buddha.

Or we could take Islam. At least they aren't worshipping Mohammed, another giver of some good ideas, but just like Christians, they can't agree on what the prophet meant, and they, too, like to fight amongst themselves when not otherwise united against a common enemy.

The only thing religion gave us was a vehicle for transmitting some good ideas, in various (typically significant) states of corruption, through time. Well, we can sift through the morass and find the worthwhile bits and throw away the rest, and then we really don't "need" religion. We can just write books or sticky notes or posts on web sites and pass them around or link to them, with all the ideas we like, without the baggage of power mad priests doing their damnedest to maintain the status quo.

And then the idea of God is brighter and shinier than ever in recorded history.