I am Dutch too, born and bred and my ancestors come from Friesland. I am not asking whether you agree or disagree. Your life as anyone else’s is at stake. I believe it is about who you are not who you follow, behave or dress like.

@ Nick

“Spiritual” people do not run everything. The evidence is there. There is a difference between “spiritual” and true spiritual people. Many are “spiritual” but make no difference to their environment for the better. True spiritual people impact their environment to make it better as like in: help the weak, the sick, the lonely, the poor, the elderly, the lost, the mentally ill, etc.

You would not want those spiritual people to stop doing what they are doing are you, Nick ? I am sure you would not take up their many a times voluntary job.

KJ, let’s just agree to disagree, as I can’t quite follow your arguments.

I agree with you. Here in S.W. UK I live in a village of only 3000 people and we have two Church of England churches, a Methodist church, a Catholic church an Anthroposphical (Steiner) Christian community building, a nearby Steiner School, a Camphill Community and a host of new-age inhabitants. I fully support their secular rights to exist but I also fully exercise my secular rights to be critical of them. As far as I know there is not one Atheist/rationalist organisation in the area and the various church’s views that secularism is aggressive are an astounding bunch of untruths – lies in other words. Rational voices are drowned out ruthlessly here in Devon because the ‘spritual’ people run absolutely everything.

How do you do a relationship ? You maintain it, by meditation of the values of someone and for example prayer and breathing, not breathing as normal breathing, but breathing as in pneuma, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatology This breathing causes a connection to the Presence of God. In that supernatural Presence you can experience all kinds of things. Things can change, healing can take place, comfort, revelation, prophetic, future related things, breakthroughs, visions, unusual miraculous things that cannot be understood by the natural mind and so many more things. You cannot “copycat” this. You have to spend time on it. Nor it can be seen by the natural senses, unless it manifests itself in the natural. It’s more a way of living by trial and error and learn from it.

I have to say this, not drinking, using drugs, does not mean you are a free person from anything that comes your way or going someone else’s way. Your identity should be you and you alone. Not copy catting someone or some religion. It is the identity that makes you as an individual. Which could mean you can just be a normal dresser but still being a highly personal individual with character. Character is what counts. Character is love, kindness, truth, reality…. etc. Even if you say I don’t harm anyone, you still could harm someone by being the example that you are without knowing. About religion “copycatting” you say, I can say this, it is not about copy catting a religious behaviour, it is about a relationship with the “Entity and Person what I call God Almighty.

plus….religion causes war right…? (: looove you derren!