Another list of failures from Joseph Stiglitz's book. Here goes :

1. War aint pretty. Soldiers who have been through hell need to be compensated. Thats what some of your taxpayers money is going to. Guess what? The government has yet to fully pay your vietnam war veterans. and the gulf war ones. dont even start to think about how much they owe the marines who lost limbs, minds, families etc. in this war

2. Because of how much money needs to be paid for the veterans, your taxpayer money is going more and more to the military. In terms of money, you spend more than the world combined for military R&D;, defense budgets and etc. The funniest thing is, the Marines didnt even come close to fully equipping and maintaining their troops on the ground. Body armor was of inferior quality, weapons have been reused for many cycles when they should have only been used for one before being sent to be refurbished, and vehicles are badly maintained as well

But its not fair to say the Iraq war was a total failure. Heres one.

1. Due to the huge amounts of money "gone missing" from the budget, when accountants finally examined the budget reports closely, they found that alot of double taking and inefficient spending had made the US Defense budget a joke of all budgets, as budgets usually are created to monitor spending, not the opposite. But in itself its a good thing. It has exposed corruption and the failings of bureaucracy yet again.

I believe the reason why we still are inately racist is because of fear. Think of it this way. If you live among a certain group of people exclusively, youll get used to living among them exclusively. the moment you see something different, youll find yourself dealing with the unknown and you get scared. Youll tend to treat people differently if they look different on the outside. Example, Im chinese. The stereotype goes that White people are more eloquent and more intelligent than Yellow people. Thus subconsciously I put on a false front and act more intelligent and refined in front of white people.

Also, the nature of human beings is unpredictable. Again due to fear, we dont like this because human beings tend to live on patterns. And the moment a wildcard is thrown into the equation, we get frustrated because we are afraid of the unknown. So, if we cant get CERTAINTY, we settle for second best - HIGH PROBABILITY. Seeing as movies show that all niggas are G's, we begin to put together a model of the black man. over time, we will have assembled our own perception of the black man, and we use this perception to paint ALL blakc people with a single brush. All because we are uncertain about how people act.

Solution? Only time and understanding. And thats asking alot from the animals we can be.

You are forgetting Capitalism vs Communism, which is STILL on going today. Just look at what happened to Georgia this year.

George Bush aboard aircraft carrier : "Ladies and gentlemen, we got him!"

Present day, 4 years later, 4000 Servicemen and servicewomen have died after the so called victory of "Operation Iraqi Liberation" (OIL).

If that was not an epic failure, i do not know what is.

Word, my friend. Word.

Why not do a case study on modern day Christianity (which should include both Catholics and Protestants) and see then if your argument still holds up?

Here's some food for thought. Many of the opposition's arguments are founded on objective morals. The very fact that we all agree that things like honour killing etc. are inhumane and cruel. Yet, that we all abide by this similar innate conscience to deem the actions of others as ethical or unethical, to me, is indicative of the existence of a moral God, hence the existence of morally aware creation.

The real question is, can religion be seperated from God? If a religion comes about by divine revelation, the world cannot be a better place without religions if God cannot reach out to humans. All we'll see is increased depravity and immorality.

Four questions.

1) Is there a God?

2) Can you oppose religion without opposing God?

3) If the world "had no religion", what would it have? We would either languish in ambiguity with regards to the question of where the universe came from (assuming that it had a start point somewhere in the past a.k.a. Big bang) or we would just have an anti-religion religion.

4) Is it possible to debate this question based on what little we know of the religions being raised?

Well said!

"What? They got bigger penises than us? BOMB THE LIVING CRAP OUT OF THEM!

Its the reason why the bombs and the bullets and the Fighter jets all are shaped like penises. Its called projecting the penis into other peoples lives. In other words, its called SCREWING WITH PEOPLE!"

R.I.P, George Carlin. R.I.P....

You drive a hard point there. But yeah you are right. The Church during the Jesus era was really corrupt and even used bribery of Jesus' own disciples to get at him. (Judas) Ill have to agree on you on this one. However, organisations are made to manage a large group of people. To manage, you need power. And power tends to corrupt. For now, Ill just pray and hope that our Vatican isn't keeping anything from us.

The Man has spoken! Well said. We humans are a weak species. We ALWAYS tend to feel sorry for ourselves when we have failed in one way or another, INSTEAD of looking up ways to remedy the problem. Instead we play the blame game.

Einstein supported religion. Thus your postulate that all scientists succeed because they dont believe in a God is baseless. True, while some people may be reduced to religious nut jobs who go around terrorizing people to get them to come to their church, but its not the only reason for intellectual stagnation. I think what breeds intellectual stagnation is failure to research something before taking up a view or ideology.

Scientology is nothing more than a bunch of lawyers waiting to slap 13 lawsuits on you for defamation, and none of them are good cos they are just hoping you will give up in face of all the redtape you have to clear, and its also nothing more than performing abortions with a clothes hanger. It sure as HELL aint religion.

Personally I am against war as the very act of fighting among each other divides us as a race. With more divisions, and with that, more bad blood between people, misunderstandings among people of different groups, be they racial, national and religious, will increase exponentially. As it is already, just LOOK at the state of the Middle East. Because of the recent surge in terrorism, everyone has taken to seeing the Middle East as a place where only dictatorship and violence rule, and that all Muslim people are Fundamentalists who delight in taking you along with them in a suicide blast. Not to mention because of the Crusades, everyone has tagged religion as nothing but a convenient excuse to declare war "in the name of God"

Also, war takes lives. And when lives are taken, they are done so in a most gruesome and cruel way, which I hope that I will never have to see even once in my lifetime.

Not to mention, war exerts a tremendous strain on the country's economy. If you dont have a comparative advantage in making weapons, then your resources will not be used efficiently, and people in your own country are going to suffer, if not in the battlefields of soldiers, then in the battlefields of their own house, where they fight for survival from hunger.

Im with you on this one. Not that i condone human testing and all, but whats done is done. And if something good came out of it, let not the tortured souls have died in vain.

Well said, and well thought out. Interesting perspective. Dont forget to kill Heinrich Himmler as well! And Joseph Goebbels!

Well, you are right in the sense that we can all be good people without religion, but having a religion can help us with that. Thats if we practice proper religion anyway. No use following a preacher who goes like "GASP You didnt come to church last sunday? YOU ARE GOING TO HELL MY FRIEND!" Theyre probably not very smart people anyway, so following them will get you no where. But there are people who have stuck to religion's true purpose, that is bettering us as people.

So you are trying to say Fascism and Democracy are religion now?

You hit it right on the nail. That's exactly the misconception that people who don't research more about something before going on hate campaigns have.

But were they truly FOR God? They were only rallying cries. True religion is about living in harmony with one another and to do good deeds, in the simplest form I can put it. Perhaps some people need guidance when it comes to doing good deeds and bettering themselves. Remember that not everyone may be as capable as you and may need guidance to do "the right thing" And dont use what's happening in the Middle East as an example to show that religion turns people into AK47 wielding, scarf wearing, bomb planting terrorists. They dont practice religion. If you think that jihad means Holy War as in a real war, you are sadly mistaken. Jihad is a Holy Struggle against the evils INSIDE us aka our bad character. Not the war against the "infidels" like the media puts it nowadays. True, a jihad can also be taken in that context, but Muslims consider it a smaller jihad. The main purpose of jihad is to strengthen your own faith, not kill people.

You may be right in the sense religion controlled by governments to control can create a dystopia where dictators are praised to the skies in the face of all the atrocities they commit, but religion in its proper context ultimately betters people. Perhaps it doesn't work for you, but that dont mean it dont work for other people.

Agreed. When they say "Should your eye cause you to sin, tear it out" They do not literally mean tear it out. They mean get rid of things that cause you to sin to stop yourselves from sinning.

And to all of you who think so ignorantly that Fundamentalist Muslims are the same as their normal Brethren, stop listening to news broadcasts and do your own research. The Muslims were not the first wage a war in the name of God. There were the Crusades. And the Crusades were not waged "in the name of God" It was because at the time the Catholic Church was politically very active, and they felt threatened by their Muslim neighbours. The Church has not denied that the Crusades happened, but they have changed. Perhaps you all should research on your subject matter before posting what you saw on TV and believe to be the truth.

Fairy tales? I cant say much about that.

Unseen force? Cant say anything about that.

Killing and oppressing each other for the sake of contrived beliefs? Now thats something I dont agree with. The world is not Iraq, or Medieval Europe. Wake up already. Im not saying those wars SUPPOSEDLY in the name of God did not happen. They did. But what makes you so firmly sure that all people with religion are like that? People with religion have lives like you. They have weaknesses like you. They all are just trying to make sense of it all just like you. They are - - - LIKE you. Don't label all the religious of the world an Islamic terrorist with AK47 in hand, or the overzealous christian who asked you why you didnt go to their church, or the medieval knights who slaughtered innocent people just because its all you think it to be. Go out there and find out from your friends who is religious and study them. Do they look like the kind of people who will hold a pistol behind your back and force you at gunpoint to convert? I dont think so. The world will always have dictators and Presidents to control the people. They are clever. Even if religion is eradicated, can you even be 1% sure they wont use other means to control you?

True. Blame it on the media portraying the situation in the Middle East as a "jihad" or holy war. In case some of you dont know, the jihad is a holy struggle. Its not about fighting evil in the name of a God, its about fighting the INNER evils within you. Its a very big misconception people have. Not all Muslims are Fundamentalists like you see on TV or perhaps in your games (for those of you who have played too much Call Of Duty 4)

Anyway, back on topic. Hobbes argued that "The state of nature is a state of war" Humans will always tend to band together for personal gain to protect themselves from what they percieve as threats. Humans will always do terrible things, with or without religion. So certainly, religion should not be blamed for all of your problems today. Religion doesn't kill people, people do. People who have been misguided and deviated so much from the original purpose of religion as a way of improving oneself.

"Things they will force on others, because they believe so fanatically they are right"

Woah, hey there, Force is a pretty powerful term to use. Perhaps you've met too many over zealous Christians and have a bad experience with them. If you've been with the not-so-cultist-like people with a religion you would notice instantly that they are human like you, they are no different from you. They just have a different way of life. So why bother shutting religion away just because you have been through several rough encounters? I think its rather overly cynical.

True, people have been over zealous and killed in the name of a God before. But what makes you think all are like that?

Take me for an instance, I'm a Catholic, a member of a religious group, but am I forcing my beliefs on you? I think not. Im just asking you to see both sides of the coin.