Vacuumfreeeke:
I can't speak for other people, but I can speak for myself and tell you about people I know which describe themselves much like I describe myself.
For myself, I do not believe that religions are all that different -- the majority of the religions seem to have their foundations on stuff like "have compassion for everyone and everything", or "be nice to each other", or stuff that could very well be translated as "in the end, only kindness matters" and I'm talking here about Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity etc. A lot of those religions only talk about spiritual matters, but some others toss in a bunch of what we could say are laws in general. It varies.
My parents were religious but did not go to church unless it was a wedding, funeral or baptism. They made us learn about our religion under the principle that we should learn something about religions, they didn't care which religion, as long as it was one and we should feel free to drop any religions if we didn't care for it, but we should learn about one or more before we could drop it completely. So, as most people in the country I grew up in, we learned about Catholicism, which would be equivalent here in America to going to a generic Protestant church.
Thing is, we compared our religion to other people's, we knew plenty of people who were agnostic, atheists, or belonged to other religions, which is the reason I say I don't see much difference between the religions. If you compare them for the things they have in common, as opposed to where they differ, you'll find plenty to identify with. If you start picking apart what they tell you can/can't eat etc, then they start seeming very different.
Lots of people I know, myself included, simply don't believe the Bible is literally true -- to us, it's a bunch of fables which are supposed to teach you something. Even the names, like say, for example, "Ruth" were picked because they meant something, in this example, "kind, nice, compassionate" or "companion". Just like many names in English mean something, like say, Heather, Rose, Daisy, April, May, Faith, Hope etc. One just doesn't think about the fact that "David" means "beloved", "Peter" means "stone, foundation" and "Paul" means "Small", they seem like just regular names and we can easily miss the fact that those were fables meant to teach.
I've met some really nice people and priests in many religious organizations, but I've seen some really nasty things -- so I do not trust any church or organization, sorry. I think the philosophy of Catholicism/Christianity is nice, but so is an awful lot of other religions. You ask me if I'm not a "true" Christian because I don't believe my religion is the only way and if it's OK to cherry pick the Bible. I say to you that if I understand the fundamentals and the core of Catholicism/Christianity, I have no choice but to cherry pick the Bible and believe other religions are manifestations of other Aspects of God the way other people can perceive God and thus other alternate ways to reach enlightenment. The very name "Catholic" means "Universal" as in we are supposed to love everyone and everyone should be accepted, for God loves us all and if something says that we should hate and/or kill someone in God's name, that is not a sentiment or teaching that comes from God. One of the only interesting lines, to me, in the movie "The DaVinci Code" was when they arrest the lunatic that has been going around killing "heathens" and the person tells the guy something along the lines of "don't you realize that your God doesn't approve of murderers?" -- in fact, I have no choice but to believe that the passages I discard may have been either a mistranslation, or intentionally put in the Bible to misguide folks into doing bad stuff, for God is supposed to be all love, peace and compassion and a loving, peaceful, compassionate being would not have instructed anyone to carry on some of the terrible things the Bible tells us to do without blinking.
Another source of problem comes from the fact that many people, especially in America, equate "religious" with "decent" -- as if people would not and/or could not be law abiding, moral, decent people unless they were religious. Nothing could be further from the truth: I know plenty of remarkable people who are agnostic/atheists, and an awful lot of nasty, cruel, greedy people (who wouldn't think twice before running over other people with a steam roller) who happen to be religious or even priests. We have all seen the scores of famous people caught with their pants down (pun intended) with prostitutes, drug dealings, stealing, embezzling money from their company and/or their clients etc, all of them hiding behind a religion or another. Usually, when I see someone finding fault with everyone else and shouting about the "sins", I start getting suspicious -- often, although not always, people who cannot control their urges are the first ones to try to eliminate the "sins" or "temptations" for everyone so they don't have to be tempted themselves. It rarely works.
So anyway, depending on who you ask and how you look at it, I'm either religious but don't belong to any church/organization, or I'm doing it all wrong, or I haven't yet realized/accepted that I'm either agnostic or atheist. I don't care what religion, if any, people are. All I care about is that we should be as nice and kind to each other as we possibly can or can stand, and we should either obey the laws or get them changed in case they are out of date (really, was there ever a real problem with people keeping a donkey in a bathtub?). As a matter of fact, I think that after a law has not been enforced for say, 30 years, it should be automatically repealed from the books to avoid selective enforcement (like say, here in Massachusetts, it used to be true that a heterosexual couple could walk around holding hands but a homosexual couple couldn't, because of an old law in the books against "public interdigitation"... really?). The automatic repeal should also come into place as soon as it could be shown that the law was not applied equally to everyone, like say no heterosexual couples have been booked for "sodomy" but lots of homosexual couples? Or you only see black people being booked for prostitution? Or even worse, only the prostitutes are being booked but not the clients (in which case WTF?, if the crime is so bad, why book only one half of the problem? [not, mind you, that I think prostitution should be a crime in a country that is the largest producer and consumer of porn in the planet: how does one distinguish between porn actors and prostitutes, except for the fact that usually, but not always, prostitutes are paid to have sex with the client instead of with each other?]); selective enforcement of laws is one of the worst ways of running a country. I think there should be very few exceptions to this automatic repeal, like say, the laws against treason.
Cheers and Peace,
-- Paulo.
