Religion
This page is one of the explanatory pages for my website, http://www.CardinalKnowledge.org. The website is a work in progress, and each and every part of it is open for discussion. The comments to these explanatory pages are where this discussion is to take place.
Religion is one of the four fundamental directions of the human collective knowledge. Unlike science, art, or philosophy, it is based on faith.
The single prerequisite for the reception of religious knowledge by an individual is faith. Faith is defined as belief without proof, and that’s all it is. Suspension of disbelief, silencing of reason, and disregard of the senses are all commonly required by religions, as those sources of knowledge often offer proofs of the contrary to what the religion is teaching. Regardless of how a particular religion was started, be it anthropomorphization of nature, deification of the dead, or deliberate design (and no, the Horus=Jesus conspiracy is still fake), once faith takes hold, it can become powerful enough to thwart doubt, reason, and senses, resulting in religious fundamentalism, the most dangerous product of the human imagination.
I’ve looked for the religion-based events and concepts that, in my opinion, affected the most number of people outside the respective religion, and, not surprisingly, most of these deal with fundamentalism: the christian antisemites, the christian taipings, the islamic terrorists, the shintoist nationalists, and the hinduist segregationists have all left their unforgivable marks on the world, and it’s hard to say if the mark of the relatively benign Giza Pyramid was greater.