This week’s “hot & cold 10” religions. Part II

This week’s “cold five” religions:

1) Judaism (more than 13 million people)

In Judaism life is the conversation between God and a human being. But judging by the number of prohibitions and restrictions that this belief imposes on its adherents you can imagine how strange this conversation is. Christianity and its modest number of commandments and deadly sins is lost in front of 613 exact instructions that Gog gave to the Jewish people. Despite the fact that the information was allegedly obtained from the single source. 248 out of 613 commandments are prescriptive and remaining 365 are directly prohibitive.  The number of bans is believed to be connected to the number of days in the year. Not a day without a prohibition! God definitely made a smart job of it. But it seems like after 250-300 commandments he had a tough time. Or else how did “The king should not have too many horses” appear in the list? But he got through it. Indeed, it’s hard not to come to believe after such a mighty work of God.

In the past, if what the Bible says is true, communication between God and his beloved sons took place more often and looked more like a dialogue. If you do something unwanted by Jahve, you die. If you are not punished, you can be sure that your relatives or children will be. Nowadays quite the same dialogue is being carried on in South Korea.

This week’s “hot & cold 10” religions. Part I

Diderot once said “One will never become free until he gets rid of God in his mind”. But do all people who haven’t “driven God out of their minds” deserve to be labeled as slaves? Can it be true that all religions, beliefs, cults and ideologies spotted their reputations by exerting pressure on their “flock” and investigating thoroughly “thought crimes” of their adherents? I’m sure that among them there can also be found some concepts that don’t give mixed messages and don’t make their votaries blush with shame in front of skeptics. There’s no doubt that all readers are aware of the largest religions postulates and are able to tell a lot of interesting things about Spinoza’s pantheism and deism that of course claim to be named among the most intelligent “God” concepts. That’s why I decided not to consider religions as a whole, but bring attention firmly to the degree of an individual's freedom in any given system of beliefs. “Am I a trembling creature or have I the right?”
Maybe it’s not the most objective index and it would be better to count the number of people who fell victims to deeds of various cults or do something else. But nobody claimed that the comparison was going to be fair.  It seems like it is the freedom of speech and action given to its adepts that lets us make assertions about the real power of a belief system.

So, here’s our hit parade: