So I had this weird dream and it stimulated a thought thread on religions.

Religions are like two or more bicycles riding close to each other in parallel lines.   The lanes are well defined by a bright line the provided the bicycles with their limits. As long as every one of the bicycles stay on course there is no issues.  But if you look at the linear timeline of history every time the bicycles cross over out of the lane they are assigned, there is an event, good or bad there is an event of some type.  Of course I m applying this to the Abrahamic based religions, especially the big three - Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Let me provide a little bit of a commentary on this thought.  If we look at our worlds history we have had very few times in history without conflict of some time.  A colonel I served under once told me these conflicts can be broken in to a few major categories: Women, Land, Wealth and Religion.  He further noted if you boil it down wealth and religion seem to be the most prevalent of these four.  Now, back to the timeline and the bicycle.  In Christian Europe the Pope was facing the dilemma of  knights fighting other knights for no real reason other than boredom.  They knew they could never be Kings or the like as they had older siblings, so what did they do challenge others.  He need to keep the peace for without it there would be a drop in the wealth flowing into the treasury.  Fortunately to him came the news of the lose of control of safe routes for the pilgrims to the holy city.  He called for a crusade. 

Now look into your minds eye and see the bicycle in its lane and it is November 1095 CE.  The Bicycle that represents the Christian beliefs is now starting it swerve towards Islams lane of existence.  Once that bike crosses the dividing line we are at conflict.  You can the time to look at a timeline and see this happen over and over.  This is just one example.  So many of them exists I could write a long entry just reviewing all the times this has happened.

So we have set a mental image now.  Let us jump forward to this time in history.  Think of the present status of the lanes and the image comes to mind of all three bikes swerve all over each others lanes while still trying to move forward.   From my experiences in riding a bike that is a waste of time and energy to have to ride that way.   It seems this is a lesson lost on many generations of leaders.   The sad thing is there has been periods of time that all of these religions co-existed and got along.  The Holy City was even an open city at times.   Now we use our religions to kill our fellow man. 

Of course this is just my humble opinion and observation based on the limited memory of a weird dream.