Weird and Religious
In ancient Egypt, priests of certain temples shaved every hair on their bodies, including eyebrows and eyelashes, every three days to avoid lice, which they saw as ritually unclean. Cleanliness was not just hygiene but a spiritual requirement.
Religious image of the day.
In the name of religion
1568 to 1648, parts of the Netherlands and German lands. Conflicts within the Eighty Years War and Thirty Years War saw massacres and destruction tied to Catholic and Protestant divisions. Violence was justified as defending correct doctrine, protecting believers, and ruling territories according to God’s will.
Fact
In Hinduism, bhakti is a major path centred on devotion to a chosen deity, involving prayer, singing, ritual acts, and a personal emotional connection with the divine.
Redefining God
Attempts to deny the close resemblance between humans and their gods usually involve redefining god into abstraction so that god becomes love itself, goodness itself, or existence itself. This is not discovery but retreat. The original gods with emotions, commands, and preferences become embarrassing under scrutiny, so they are dissolved into vagueness. What remains cannot think, feel, or act, which makes it indistinguishable from nothing at all. This strategy preserves belief while discarding its content, a linguistic gesture that saves the word while losing the idea.
Quote of the day
“Faith is the great cop out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence.” Richard Dawkins.
Ask the right question
If animals also suffer, are they being punished for past lives as well, and what moral system would justify that?
Religious Crooks
Edd Branson is a Zimbabwean prophet known for prophecy and miracle branding, with critics alleging that religious image and promises are used as part of a money generating enterprise.
For more information, google the name.
Almost all of the crooks appearing in this section have their own wikipedia page.
Today we took a look at yet another religious crook but there are hundreds of thousands of them. You could spend a lifetime researching the topic.