Bad Wigins wrote:When life gets down to the nitty gritty it's not always in people's best interest to get along with other people. Survival comes first.
And therein lies the rub... Anybody can claim "nitty gritty, golden-rule-free day" whenever they like and for whatever reason they like.
If you have a god, I'm happy to acknowledge that your god is real to you. And I state also that your god is not real to me. And I see no essential conflict between these two subjective truths. Neither of us has the capacity to know the objective truth.
The existence of organized religion is a double edged sword, essentially beneficial for individuals (in providing some form of guiding principles, ideally bot not necessarily - think radical interpretations of the koran for example - "good"), and essentially insidious / evil (to my way of thinking) for groups. Religion (and other common beliefs or practices, such as language or significant customs) leads to conflict between groups (moreso than between individuals), which can be boiled down to distrust and fear of anything / anyone different (i.e. unknown, mal-understood).
And the law of unintended consequences yields plenty of awful outcomes from, say, religious missions. But that's a tangent...