The Problem that Is Religion

Let's face it, religion is an enormous aspect in our society. You can hardly go a day without seeing a servant of God praising his every doing or a convinced atheist posting under an arguable YouTube video calling out religious nuts for being Nazis. It's part of life and it won't go away anytime soon nor will people want it to go away. We are stuck with it. From the dawn of time, the human race has placed their trust in godly beings to guide them to a successful life style. They've been the thing to lean on through troubling times and the scapegoat for wicked acts. While religion has been under debate for thousands of years, the premise of it is actually a great thing. But why is it such a complete suck fest? And what are the flaws behind it?

Well a lot of aspects turn it into a heated topic actually. Naturally, the belief in a God will always be controversial, but because of the practices of humanity it has become a hated controversial topic. The blame can be placed on both sides of the argument: those who believe in a god and those who don't. These two groups are definitely to blame, but they don't necessarily share it equally. Throughout my short life I have experienced that those who are religious have a higher tendency to go onto the offensive. Although my experience isn't so credible, this offensive behavior can be seen all throughout history, especially after the 14th century in Europe. But more on history later.

Now, before I seemingly defend those who don't follow a god or a spiritual idea, I want to make it perfectly clear that I think the idea of religion is fantastic. I honestly think that under all the junk that "believers" have turned it into, there is an awesome potential for religion. Among its positive aspects, it allows a personal, intimate relationship between a higher power and you. 

I think of it as a relationship between a dog and his master. Think of the "believer" as the dog and God as its master. No matter what the master does with his dog, the dog will love him almost no matter what. After the dog learns that its human is trustworthy, it begins to develop a deep connection with them. The dog relies on the human for everything: food, water, shelter and entertainment. And even when things get bad and it's master punishes him, the dog will love him anyways. If a dog is smart, he'll start to lose trust in his human after so much abuse. But as it seems, dogs are dumb and will love their master until the day they die. It's exactly like humans' relationship with God, we love him when there is good in our lives and we still love him when he kills off our parents, gives you terminal cancer, separates your family, gets a car to run over your pet, or induces surgeons to amputate your penis. We are stupid really, but we fall for the system so hard that the stupidity actually makes religion effective and attractive. We want somebody to do everything for us.

It may seem harsh, but it's true. Religion creates a relatively invincible compassion towards God. For example, what if God killed your child? It'd suck, you would cry and question God for a while, but you'd probably still love him. But what if your husband or wife murdered you baby? Then it's a whole different story, you will immediately hate them and do anything in your power to bring justice to your murdered child. We give God special treatment.

I don't understand why we do either. Now, you might be saying "that example is bullshit because it's against the 10 Commandments!" Yeah I know, it goes against the Bible's sixth commandment: Thou Shall Not Kill, but don't you think that God should be following the same rules that he requires humans to follow? I definitely think he should. What if your dad told you it was prohibited to eat in his house, but against his own rule you always saw him eat in the house? It would make him seem like a dick, wouldn't it? I'd sure think he would be.

As a reader, you may think I'm completely biased against religion and have formed the opinion in your brain that I'm atheist. That couldn't be more false. Personally, I believe in God and the teachings Jesus Christ gave about two thousand years ago. I am a Christian. Granted, I'm not hardcore "Team Jesus" but I believe that his influence on the Bible was a great gift to humanity. In it contains many positive moral values and ethics that all should take note of, but I don't think you should be required to follow everything in the Bible. It seems better to consider it as a guideline to reference good qualities and how to live an insightful life. Not only do people believe following every word in the Bible is a requirement, they also are complete hypocrites about it too. They preach anti-gay rights because it goes against the religious text, while Christians everywhere are getting tattoos and piercing. It's arguable whether gay marriage is worse than getting a tattoo, but at the end it doesn't matter because it's against the Bible! A sin is a sin. There are no exchange rates. Religious people shouldn't be protesting causes that go against the Bible if they can't obey the rules themselves. Not only are they extremely overreacting,  but they also look really, really dumb.

"Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves. I am the LORD." -Leviticus 19:28

That leads me to my next argument about why religion is flawed, the fact that Christians and other religions I know of believe they cannot be wrong! This issue commonly dates back to the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution but I'll only dabble into the Protestant Reformation. The Protestant Reformation started when Martin Luther (not Martin Luther King Jr.) was fed up with the Catholic Church's system of indulgences, which was the church's act of selling the forgiveness of sins to get out of hell. It was a stupid idea that people fell for and it finally took the courage of Luther to pin up The Ninety-Five Theses on a church door to get people to start banding together to end the Catholic church's bad doings (the indulgences weren't the only thing wrong but they were the match that started the fire). Events advanced and Luther eventually made his own branch of Christianity, Lutheranism. The pope got extremely pissed (he must have been on his period) because his followers and he were going against the "only" right sect of Christianity. For gods sake, the Catholic Church started a war to silence Luther's heretical thoughts against the only way Christianity should be followed. The pope "knew" being catholic was the only right way. What makes this hilarious is that Lutheranism and the other religious sects that branched out as a result were still christian, yet god forbid they break away from the only right church of Jesus Christ. I'm tired of history just as much as you are so I'll give you some contemporary examples.

I often find myself listening to two people getting it on about if God is real or not. I always hear it! But it gets me so frustrated when the atheist of the argument presents cold hard facts and the person on God's side ignores his truly valid point, something that's actually been proven, and just quotes a verse from the Bible or says something along the lines of God is responsible for everything that happens on Earth. I'm not saying that there is no such thing as a God, but I have the humility to accept the fact that the higher up that I follow for advice may not be real. And everybody needs to accept that. Period. Whereas scientists have been proven to actually create life, no one has been able to prove with physical evidence that there is a God that exists. Jesus Christ existed, there is proof on that, but there is no evidence that he lived beyond his death. There could have been various ways Jesus got out of his tomb after he was "dead" that didn't require any godly powers.

And ironically, the way Christians arrogantly preach the "truth" about God and ignorantly argue about his guaranteed existence actually pushes those away from religion. It was like that for me, I was once a regular to a church called First Baptist Euless. At first it seemed pretty cool, but when I saw the youth pastor literally screaming out that God is the only way and damn those that don't believe in him... I lost a lot of my faith in God. I still believe in him but as I educate myself in this world and read more into the Bible, I begin to question Him. I won't be surprised if by the time I get out of college I'll lose complete faith in any God. But it didn't nor does it have to be that way. If church's instead of preached to their followers to keep their faith to themselves and merely recommend it to people instead of fighting non-believers with information that is invalid to them then maybe a lot of people and me wouldn't be so hateful against Christianity.

It's because Christians come off so hateful that they are losing so much people to atheism, by trying to gain more believers in Christ they are actually driving people away. If instead of creating harsh protests against gay rights and simply let people do what they wanted to do without PMSing, Christ's church may be credible and still vastly liked than it is today. It's all about how you present yourself, if you act like a sexist, racist, ignorant pig, nobody will like you. And must I say, Christians are doing a great job looking like uncivilized pigs.

Like I said, the idea of religion is awesome if it is executed correctly. But the way people use religion today is just out of line. It makes me and a bunch of other tolerant Christians hated, and honestly I'd rather throw out my faith if it means I won't be part of the religious nut demographic. I'm not saying whether atheism or religion is better, it doesn't matter, rather my goal is to pick out the flaws that religion has created within itself. And boy does it have an abundance of flaws.