Friday, June 21, 2002

God without Religion?


Can there be such a thing? Of course! God, no matter what your theological belief is, can exist without organization. I believe religion holds the human race back from acheving world peace and social maturity.

Though out history you can see examples of how religion has destroyed and killed in the name of god. People were enslaved or worse because they believed something other than the popular norm. Christianity, because of its size and popularity, has a history rittled with horrible crimes against humanity. Every time they are forgiven, yet horrors occur again. Christianity preaches forgiveness. That's wonderful, but without learning from the mistakes of the past that forgiveness was wasted.

The Crusades, the hunt for the holy grail, killed countless Muslims unnecessarily. The Christians invaded in the name of God.

Muslims are not innocent either. Not all are extreamly strict, however the popular belief, which is shown here, shows a religion that practices oppressive and agressive social and ethical rules. These rules worked thousands of years ago, but today only express ignorance and intolerance.

Buddism is very popular and yet passive, however it is really a philosophy. A way of living.

Three very distinct views on the world and heaven and unfortunatly, in general cannot work together. For the world to come together as one, these differences MUST be put aside. A cosmological disaster could bring us together, such as an on coming asteroid or comet, however aside from that our religious differences will keep us apart.

Even those who are agnostic are alienated from those who have a religion. There are many shades of gray here. This isn't black and white.

I believe there is a god. Something started this all, but I don't agree with any of the religions I have studied. I don't feel the need to belong to a flock of sheep either. There are many individuals in various religions who are very intelegent, educated and tolerant of others beliefs and ideas. Unfortunatly, as we see every day, those kind of people are a very small minority. Every day we see people armed with a very small piece of knowledge and a large piece of popular speculation and judge all those around them with it.

You could say, "Hey Marc, that's exactly what you are doing here." Possibly yes, but the point is not to say everyone is wrong for thier beliefs. People go wrong when they do not THINK! I do not claim that ridding the world of religion would be practical or even possible. I don't claim that it would fix the worlds problems either. Without religion people may find a new outlet for thier fight for supremacy. The Nazis did this. They said all that were not like them were inferior and many, in particular, the Jews were considered so bad that they should not be allowed to live.

Consider this, we are ALL Earthlings. We all live on the same planet. Like it or not everything that we do affects everyone else. We say things like, "It's my life, I can do whatever I want." Now expand that to the city, state or nation. We sound like teenagers! The U.S. is the pretty rich kid who things he/she is better than all the others. It doesn't matter if the US is or not, the point is that the behavior upsets countries that have to walk in the shadow of the US. It also creates small "lacky" countries that pretend to respect us, but really dont. They are around to take advantage of the associations with the US and the scraps that come thier way.

Truely is this the way the world should work? Are we truely a bunch of greedy teenagers? The "me-me" mentality can be removed without religion, which...

Sorry, to be continued....

No comments: