This is an excellent thread. Any person who has thought about it deeply has had to struggle with this question and I just wanted to share for those interested writings of some famous thinkers who have struggled with the same question.

This first one is by Jean Jacques Rousseau who lived from 1712-1778. It is an excerpt from his Book "Emile or on education"

http://library.umac.mo/ebooks/b1362605x.pdf

This second one is by Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) who looks at the church strictly as a Historian and tries to answer the question. Why has the church been so successful at what it does? This is also an excerpt from a bigger book "Decline and fall of the Roman Empire."

https://www.ccel.org/g/g...line/volume1/chap15.htm

Faith and religion are different, no? Faith is what happens inside you, religion is what you do to get inside.

Religion isn't simply a tool for mass control. At the moment, mass control is in the hands of consumerism and tightly regulated labor conditions on the one hand and a pseudo-scientific understanding of the world. That's enough for mass control, which by the way carries a promise of heaven on earth.

Religiosity is what most of us engage in, and that's why faith is lost. You confuse religion for faith. And being extrinsic the spirit of the times carry you away.

But knowledge is always limited and changing and only contemplation and meditation, study, labor and exercise are need to see the 'invisible'. These activities are part and parcel of religion.

Religion is also a collective activity... can the collective celebration of atheism escape religiousness?

Jesus said: if you keep my commandments you shall abide in my love, as I have kept my Father's Commandments and abide in His love (John 15.10). Jesus was teaching submission and obedience to God's Law.

Islaam is an Arabic word which comes from the word silm which means submission, acceptance of and obedience to God's Commandments. As a result of which salaam, peace and happiness, becomes available.

What Jesus was teaching was what is called in Arabic Islaam.

If we go back a bit in history, the Israelites, the idea in their minds got narrowed down to that of a tribal God. But their ancestors like Jacob (whose name was changed to Israel in the Bible) had the principle of worshiping ONE GOD, the One True and
Universal God.

The Jews or Christians claim the merits of Father Abraham and of Jesus, BUT DO THEY FOLLOW THEM? Because there were righteous men in the past, it cannot help
us unless we are ourselves righteous.

The Jews initially, though taught Unity, went after false gods, and the Christians invented the Trinity or borrowed it from Paganism. We must go back to pure, the doctrine of Abraham, to live and die in faith in the One True God.

@ Alphadoti. You are preaching to the choir. Selective pick of bible verses to justify your view point is not going to convert anyone. You also simply cannot create your own claim out of the same verses! Point to us from the same bible you have quoted where it says or shows that" Of course it must be a another nation different from Jews... The Nation of Islaam: Muslims".