Religion

  Now, when I try to think about God, I cannot imagine the God of scriptures or the bible, I simply cannot bring myself to believe in burning bushes and parting oceans or that those books were written by anyone but men, who had vivid imaginations and a desire to control others.  While I don’t believe all aspects of religion to be bad, it is true that more people have died in the name of religion than perhaps any other tragedy, ever.  Listening to religious debates and dogma it becomes even more clear that each religion is totally bias, each seeking to save only a select few, who happened to be born in the proper part of the world, each religion claims that all the others are wrong, that that particular religion is the one and only right one and to believe otherwise or question this is to spend eternity in hellfire.  Yet you will hear them speak of how God is loving and God saves.  It becomes clear that this is merely a desperate act to cling onto a dying system of control that more and more people are becoming aware of.  

Religion is a form of mass control, it is a system to keep people from asking questions through fear of eternal damnation, to keep us all as ‘sheep’ while those in power make the decisions that shape or lives.  Systems of control and obedient slavery still exist, through capitalism and government, but for many centuries and still to this day religion has a powerful grip on the minds of men and women all over the world.  To try and discuss logically with some of these people is an exercise in futility.  Having a conversation with a friend who was a devote Christian, the subject of dinosaurs came up.  I mentioned that the dinosaurs were extinct before mankind existed.  He immediately recited a verse (I don’t know which) in which the beasts tail was as large as a river, therefore  dinosaurs must have existed at the same time as man. And that was literally as far as he was willing to go with that discussion.  There were no if’s ands or buts.  Because he had read that in the bible, or wherever he did indeed read that, it was the truth and the only truth he cared to believe.  It was at that point that I felt sorry for him, because he was by no means a stupid person, but I was truly baffled that someone could be so ignorant and shut their eyes to the facts that science and archeology presented to us.  Like so many others, he was not even curious to know anything different, certainly not to question the scriptures or the bible, for surely that would mean an eternity in hellfire.  Needless to say, I dropped the conversation and never brought up anything remotely scientific around him again.  The sad part is, he is by no means alone in this ignorance.  Wherever I go on the web, I see comments on scientific videos or lectures about how none of that is true, that we are infidels and non believers who shall all burn in hell for our sins.   Now,  I know religion is supposed to teach ‘love thy neighbor’ but honestly all the religion I see seems to be ‘love thy neighbor, unless he doesn’t believe exactly the same thing you do’  which quite frankly puts me into conflict with these ideals.  I won’t call myself an atheist or agnostic, but I am certainly not of the belief that enforcing my beliefs on others with threats of eternity in hell is the right way to love humankind and be open minded.  All my life I have listened to others and seen how many different views can help shape society, but none is more alarming then the narrow minded views of such individuals who preach about scriptures in such a way that renders all logical or free thought obsolete.  These people are truly blind and worse yet they condemn all those who don’t follow them in blindness.   

I don’t want to mock anyone’s beliefs; it is fine to believe in things, even if they can’t necessarily be proven.  What I do have a problem with is people killing or threatening people over the lack of such beliefs, or different beliefs altogether from their own.  This shows the power of the system of control that the church has had on us for centuries.   To this day, even given all the advances in technology and new understanding of the cosmos, understandings that are clearly in conflict with the primitive concepts taught in the bible, people are still unwilling to turn the page and accept a new reality.  If religion chose to believe in unicorns but nobody had ever died for it, there wouldn’t be a real issue over it.  The fact is, religion has killed hundreds of thousands of people throughout the ages, not just one religion but many, all with the same blind faith, faith in something that cannot be proven, need not be proven, all preached by churchmen who themselves are men, human beings like the rest of us.   If in 2 thousand years we preached that the LHC particle accelerator in Switzerland was built by God himself, should they believe us?  If we wrote books on science and claimed that the words they contained were gleaned through meditation with a higher, invisible being who was omnipotent, would they all us crazy? Probably.  Now if we went further and killed anyone who disagreed with our statements, and threatened certain eternal suffering for anyone who strayed from these beliefs, what would that be called?  I would call that insanity.