[Serious] The love of a God

[Oldandeasilyconfused]

Religions aren't untouchable, they can be destroyed.  Just ask the christians.  I wouldn't be concerned with his friends belief in god so much as the nascent prosperity gospel explanation of charitable donations, your no5.  It's not a true belief, but it's a fit belief.  It mainly preys on desperate people who would very much like to believe in miracles, and miracles for them, and miracles in the form of money for them.....but that's not actually the direction that this particular miracle of money flows.

All religions and political and social  systems eventually fall.  Most recently it was the Soviet Union. Next may be North Korea. The PRC autocrats have cunningly realised that many potential trouble makers will accept loss of political freedom for a level of economic freedom. They seem to have pretty tight grip. They may last a while yet, but not indefinitely.

The problem  with human institutions is that we can't ever be sure their replacements will be better. You know, like christianity and the far more permissive religions it replaced.  Today, I really like the general Japanese approach to religion; Both Shinto and Buddhism , depending on circumstance. 

My favourite is the ancient Egypt religion, which lasted for over 3000 years. As far as I'm aware, the oldest organised religion still extant is Zoroastrianism/ Parsi, which is certainly over 2000 years old, and whose origins may be as old as 4000 years

One of my favourite poems is 'Ozymandias' by Percy Bysshe Shelley.   It's about one of the greatest Pharaohs, Rameses The Great.  He built Abu Simbel and a great many more monuments to himself:


I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings;
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

— Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias"[4]