I get that a lot from religious folks. I can't argue with that ! Yes I do hate religion. I don't hate every religious persons, although some I truly despise. But over all, they are good and honest people that I respect. It is their faith that I don't respect.
Some people often tells me : How can you take religion away from good, honest, well minded people ? If it helps them becoming better persons, why take that away from them ?
First of all, I can't take religion away from them since they believe in it all so much. I'm just a nobody that is way to impulsive, arrogant and undiplomatic to convince them that they are delusional and that they could find the same overwhelming feeling of being "special" without delusional beliefs.
When I think about the universe, for example, the simple fact that it exists sometime brings tears to my eyes and this feeling is something that a lot of religious people have experienced. I just don't need to believe in magic, angels, demons, God, fairies and superheroes to find this world absolutely wonderful and worthy of living and dying for. As the late
Douglas Adam puts it very well :
Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too ?But why do I still tell people that religion is a load of bullshit if it makes them feel better
? Simply because I don't care that it makes them feel better. If you were to tell me that you hear voices in your head and that these voices really makes you feel very good, I will not hesitate to tell you that you are delusional and should get yourself checked, because someday these voices could tell you some pretty heavy shit that will make you do things that you would not have done otherwise.
I see religion exactly in the same way. Believing in things for no reasons
i.e. faith, can make you do things that you would not have done without it. The World Trade Center is an extreme and fresh example of that.
Something I really hate that religious people say all the time is that without faith, morality cannot exist. This is one of the biggest load of crap I have ever eared ! Let's stay with the 9/11 attacks and let me quote what
Steven Weinberg said about it in the BBC program, "
The Atheism Tape". He was saying that although the terrorists did what they did for pure religious reasons, George Bush said that these terrorists have hijacked a great religion because what they did didn't fit his idea of what a religion is. So M. Weinberg said :
You see, what is really going on here is that these people, instead of using their religion to say what is moral (like they claim they do), they are using their moral sense to decide what is religious. If that's the case then what's the point of the religion ?So, in my view, religion as hijacked morality and as brainwashed people into believe that it can only come from them. Morality is a human attribute, not a divine one and if you think otherwise, you have been fooled !I dream of the day when religion, along with every other faith based ideas , will be dead, long gone and all of what is left of it is the poetry, the music, and the wonderful architectures. I hope that someday we will be able to live our lives like we want to without some people telling us what is moral and what is not just because of what is written in an old, ancient and archaic book. But of course, this is only a dream...