Were you raised a believer? Were you taught since infancy that some all-knowing, all-powerful God made you in His image, and that he now watches over you and guides the actions of your life? But that you still somehow have free will, and that the choices you make and the actions you take in your brief few years in this world will somehow determine your fate for all eternity?
This God made you as you are– a creature with the power of rationality and reason– and yet demands that you reject reason and logic and instead place your full belief in the words of a book. A book written by man, but claimed to be of divine origin. Stories about impossible feats and actions, yet presented as irrefutable truth.
For many, questioning the stories was simply not allowed. For others, it was met with dismissive answers of God’s unknowable nature, or working in mysterious ways. For yet others, it became their life’s work to study these stories and attempt to contrive some sense of logic or consistency from them, to explain away the contradictions and vagueries, to attempt to reconcile a collection of myths and fables with a very real world that disproves its stories at every turn.
But this God loves you, as He loves all beings. All the pain and suffering in this world is due to our own sins, our lack of faith, our lack of worship of His grace and kindness. If only we were more devoted, there would be no starving children, no senseless violence, no cancer to slowly kill our loved ones or ourselves.
We were made in God’s image. Which is to say that God was made in our image, because that is all our imaginations allow us to conceive. We can imagine an afterlife of heavens or virigins or lakes of fire, because these are fantasies that allow us to imagine ourselves– in our current human forms– as continuing to exist after we die. It is comforting to believe that we continue on with our same consciousness, our same memories and personalities and being exactly who we are now, even though our mortal bodies– our brains and minds– cease to function.
For just a moment, try to imagine eternity. Eternity. Try to picture what it would be like if “we” were to experience endless time, whether heaven or hell. Would we remember what happened a thousand years ago? A million years ago? Would we stay perfectly static as we were when we died? What if we were sick or infirmed? Do we stay in our most “ideal” form? Do we grow? Do we learn? Do we evolve? Or is linear time a construct of our mortal form, and if there is any possible afterlife, it would be something that we can’t even possibly imagine because we have no frame of reference? Would that infinite form have any relation to our individual selves from these brief few years on this earth?
How does any of this make sense? How can you examine any aspect of religion– from its origin stories to its modern rules to its promises of eternal futures– and not immediately see a thousand glaring inconsistencies?
How can you live this one brief life in constant fear of something for which there is no proof? How can you worship and praise an all-powerful being that inflicts so much pain on suffering on innocent people, only to be told that His reasons are unknowable?
This is a critique of religion in its purest form. This is not a critique of the consequences of religion in the wrong hands, such as those who use religion to justify violence and hatred, or those who use religion to exploit the faithful and enrich themselves. But is this pure belief that enables these consequences. If we shed this primitive dulling of our minds– if we elevate our species to think critically– this manipulation is far more difficult.
To read any religious text with a literal interpretation is absurd. At best, we can treat these texts as allegories meant to help us develop of our sense of morality. Jesus as a symbol of universal love and selflessness is inspiring; Jesus as the literal son of God is insanity.
All religion breeds subservience. Faith is, by definition, a slave mentality. It conditions us to submit ourselves to higher authorities, whether that authority is a divine voice in our heads, or a pastor who preaches hate (or perhaps even more sickening, a “prosperity gospel”), or an autocratic politcal leader, or a power-tripping law enforcement officer, or an domineering or abusive spouse, or any huckster claiming to have the answers to your problems, or any of a hundred other artificial authorities.
To reject god is to love humanity. Any god that is worth worshipping would be disgusted by worship.
Slay your god. Free your self.
Leave a Reply