How many religious people truly believe????
Why do we never see people celebrating the death of a loved one?? if heaven is so great why so sad???, whats the old saying "every one wants to go to heaven but no body wants to die":sneaky2:
Some one mentioned nuns earlier, they and monks are the only true Christians, Jesus told his disciples to be "no part of this world".
I see so many christians living very full lives now, but having read the entire bible several times (well I listened to it on audio tape) I know that jesus taught that his followers should have only the very bare necessities of life and spend the majority of their time and effort preaching the the good news of his kingdom, this is very rare among most Christian groups.
I honestly think that religion is a crutch or sort of insurance policy, people do what they think is enough and this gives them peace of mind and means they don't need to worry about death (which some people really struggle to come to terms with) Some people do have a "God shaped hole" in there lives and a religion helps them cope, but a great many people do not. I don't, I remember nothing from before my birth so I'm sure thats the same state to which I will return, so why worry. As has already been mentioned my immortality is in my children, their future is far more important to me than mine.
When I was a JW there were many benefits, I had a huge family of "brothers and sisters" who would help me when ever asked. I could travel to any part of the world walk into a Kingdom hall and be treated like family. If I wanted help with DIY of car repairs, they were there and most of them were very nice people, I miss them greatly. BUT its simply not true and once I realised this I could not live a lie and more importantly I could not teach my children a lie.
We had 200 people at our wedding, a huge number of those people would now cross the road if they saw me coming. My wife and I have had to leave virtually everyone we knew behind when we left (as did her parent), but we knew by leave our children would not be within this cult and the friends they made would be unconditional and hopefully last a life time.
I thing that gets me most about many religious people is the hypocrisy, as the bible puts it "they have a form of godly devotion but prove false to its power"