Not really true. You can trace this back to early days of shamans and other religious beginnings quite easily. Those with the "spiritual" knowledge usually held power (ranking either highest or 2nd highest to the rulers). That's one of the reasons the Egyptian Pharoahs were considered (minor) gods. After all, with religion = power, you can't be the leader of your world when someone else has a higher knowledge of religion than you.KEN-JENNINGS wrote:
The belief in God is markedly different from the belief in Santa Claus - we can trace back the evolution of the belief in Santa Claus, whereas we cannot do the same for belief in a higher power.xaven wrote:
Hmm... just my 2 cents: You cannot prove that God or Allah or whatever exists, like you cant prove that Santa Clause exists or easter-bunny I mean, accept that this is a religion based on beliefs. You say you are atheist, so do not try to argue scientific in this case. This is the 21st century, isn't it? Fortunately I live in an enlightened society, no middle-eastern or American conditions here.KEN-JENNINGS wrote:
Prove to me God doesn't exist, and then we will talk.
I tolerate those servers, but its a bit funny to see a religious community server dealing with a war game trying to enforce a Christian behavior.
What would I argue scientific about? Being atheist is a belief system. I choose to believe there is no higher power, except for the life force that runs through every living thing. Since you seem to know so much about America (USA, or all the Americas oh enlightened one) and the Mid-East, tell me why Germany is more enlightened then either of these places, and what "conditions" are you talking of.
As far as people who argue that these are Christians playing a war game, thats all it is - A game. This is fantasy. Are Christians only supposed to read good-time feel good stories? Can they only surround themselves with uplifting events? Just because they believe in God, Jesus Christ as the Son of God, doesn't mean they can't play a video game. I would hope not. If you are going to chastise Christians for being hypocrites, I think you would have a better argument if you brought up Christians engaging in real life warfare and killing, not through a video game.
Hell, the Pharoah's were pretty good at tricking the people, too. One of their big ones was the Pharoah predicting the rise/fall of the Nile. Egyptian scientists figured out the patterns of the Nile so it was relatively easy to calculate things and have the Pharoah give predictions. Not surprisingly, he tended to be right. The mistakes likely written off as the gods being upset at something rather than a surprise change in the weather pattern (freak storm, etc) that caused the prediction to be off.
From history, we mostly see that religion was used for a couple things:
1) Answer questions they didn't have the answers to. What causes day and night? Why, Apollo rides across with his chariot to create the change (or something like that)
2) Power. Religion meant knowledge and many used it to their political advantage.