The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.
Verbal Kent
A religion is simply a "belief" that one system of "beliefs" is necessarily "superior" to all others, and that all others therefore pose different degrees of threat to our superior beliefs.
The simplest examples of this are the monotheistic religions of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. But these "spiritual" religions," which are no less worldly in fact than every other "religion" there is," are simply precursors to the religions that have since surpassed them in their ability to control people's minds. Today, the greatest "religions" of the world are purely secular, yet believed in and even worshiped far more than the religions of old.
Today's religions come in a variety of forms, of course, but they work in exactly the same way as the religions of old. The old religions worked by convincing countless numbers of people that the world, and indeed the universe, was simply a battleground of ideas. And that those ideas could easily be divided into camps of "right" and "wrong" thinking, for the universe was governed by a "natural law" agaisnt which all ideas were necessarily measured.
Anyone with the "wrong" ideas was "evil" or a threat to a person's eternal soul, and anyone with the "right" ideas was "one of us," and therefore a member of God's flock (believing in God, hell, heaven, an eternal soul, etc, are all considered "good" ideas, and being skeptical of such ideas is always considered a "bad" idea). Morality, everyone was then taught to "believe," depended upon this distinction, without which the world would devolve into a sulfuric nightmare of hellish proportions before a person could finish reading this sentence.
People have therefore been taught to "believe" that they, for having held the "right" ideas and battled everywhere to overcome the "wrong" ones," may (and it is only "may," not "will") win an eternity with the most famous diva of all the deities that humanity has ever known. If they fail to stand up everywhere for those "right" ideas, and by so failing only allow the "wrong" ideas to spread, they will (and it is only "will," not "may") be punished by the God above for all of eternity!
What has evolved out of centuries and indeed millennia of such religions are new ones, that no doubt draw all of their power of persuasion and control from the old religions, and certainly ape those old religions in virtually every way, but succeed and flourish by convincing people they are not religions at all. Those religions come in the forms of nationalism, patriotism, racism, economics, classism, and even at times, scientism, secularism and atheism. And this list is by no means exhaustive.
Like the monotheistic religions, these latter religions not only all work in tandem together with monotheism, even as each reinforces the others to shape one overarching "universal" system of "right and wrong" (or so it appears, anyway), but war with each other for supremacy in the realm of ideas as much as any religion ever has. Capitalism is clearly more moral than communism, any good Christian will tell you, even if Christ was in charge of running a country under the latter, and the devil the former.
People worship their "beliefs" as their only God, in this way, convinced that there is something altogether "objectively" good or bad about their "beliefs." It never occurs to them that they are only ever really using their own morality, and thus their own subjective interpretation of those "beliefs," to decide whether, say, Christianity or atheism or Communism or Capitalism are necessarily "good" or "bad."
Of course, the person who is brutally murdered by Christians would very likely conclude that such a system of beliefs is unquestionably evil, in the very same way that every Christian is convinced that anyone who is murdered by an atheist is unquestionable proof that atheism is necessarily evil. Such Christians do not see their own Christianity the same way they see their guns. Not at all. For such a Christian, their religion is like drugs, of which the Christian is quite convinced are always evil.
Point out that drugs are in fact quite a good thing, when used in certain ways to overcome certain illnesses and such, and the Christian will then agree. (It may never occur to that Christian that the people who use "illegal drugs" do so to alleviate the cancer of modern civilization on the human heart.) But, changing gears, while the card carrying NRA Christian will then consider insists everywhere that guns are neither good nor bad, but merely a tool, that is determined as one or the other by how it's used, they are quite sure their religion works in exactly the other way round.
For them, Christianity is always and everywhere "good," even if it is the most effective means the devil himself has ever found to convince countless numbers of people to commit evil "so fully and so joyfully," and guns, like war and torture and the death penalty (and apparently genocide and world wide floods) are only ever "good" or "bad" depending on whether they are being used for God or by God, or against God.
Genocide is not really "bad," therefore, it's just whether it's being done to advance one superior idea or religion, or another. Just ask God, and he'll tell you all about it.
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