[aldente]

A couple days ago I did receive a letter 'from the desk of' Walter Cronkite (since I subscribed to the Nation, the American Prospect and Harpers for a while there) stating that as an anchorman back in the day he had to hold back his opinion but now he feels the need to speak out (I didn't know that the fellow was still alive in the first place).
Anyway, his point was that certain elements in the political arena deliberately abuse religious tasks for political purposes (namely Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell). Quote: I have watched with increasing alarm that the Christian Coalition and other Religious Right groups manipulate religion to further their intolerant, political agendas.

There are many variations therof but what they all have in common is that the topic nature is always going back to a case by case individual one and it runs parallel with what is essentially the differentiation between being a sheep and what some refer to as sheeple.

Karl Marx called religion once 'the opiate for the masses' and he probably was quite correct in his evaluation, since what he referred to was not the content out of which organized religion arises but the framework of words and laws that by default evolves around it. I did a Wikipedia search on heroin and to my understanding the consumer essentially doesn't give a shit about anything anywhere at any time, total loss of reality followed by symtoms of withdrawl once a state of addiction has been reached. Similiar effects can be observed with subscribers to religious belief systems. Imagine you would take God away from a believer!!

For those interested in reading up some more about the brain washing techniques most commonly utilized here an intersting site: The Battle for you Mind