I've just had a religious epiphany

[Teddy (IDS Legislator)]

I've always tried to (unsuccessfully) explain to people WHY it is important to ALWAYS be nice to EVERYONE, ALL the time, even if you hate them, or, they don't deserve it...

Earlier today I was in a taxi and talking to the driver about religion, and I told him that my personal belief is that God wants us to be nice...

And just like 60 seconds ago it hit me.

Why am I arguing with these people? Why am I trying to explain it? And more importantly, why can't they understand it?

The answer: Faith.

I really do believe that God demands that we be nice.


I think I will say this from now on as it's easier than getting into arguments.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

You talk to taxi drivers about religion? And you aren't a Jehova's Witness or anything?

[Teddy (IDS Legislator)]

No, I just wanted to know if Siekh's could drink alcohol or not and we got carried away

[Associate Justice PiT]

     I've tended to think that religious arguments across religions were sort of pointless. It's one thing to have an argument between two people who follow the same holy text & have a common source of inspiration to discuss their interpretations of. It's another thing to have an argument between two people who come from very different traditions & follow very different texts. In the latter case, there are certain unspoken assumptions that can preclude the finding of common ground. I suppose you can characterize these assumptions as being part of faith.

[Teddy (IDS Legislator)]

I find religion makes having arguments easier.

Many years ago I used to say to people who were all like "the bible says this" that "well we will never know for sure what God wants..." whereas now it's easier to just say "Nope, you are wrong"

[afleitch]

Being ' nice ' is mutually beneficial. Ah the wonders of evolution

[King]

I don't think a religious epiphany was necessary to reach the conclusion "be nice."

Christianity has always taught people to love one another.  The main problem with it is that not one word in the Bible tells you how to love one another.  It's mostly a list of sins and oh BTW most important thing is love each other, which is why it takes devout religious Christians years of study to learn about Rule #1. This is why there's so much anti-sin bigotry among a lot of sects.

In fact, the uniting theme among all religions is the base ideal about loving one another in some way, but it gets drowned out by the 1000s of other pages of doctrine about archaic social law and inaccurate parables to explain the nature of the universe.  I'm not just talking about the Testaments and Quran, either.  Hindu and Buddhist dogma is also a convoluted mess.