WHY RELIGION IS BAD FOR YOU
Religion is bad for you because:
1) It does not allow you to think freely. Religion is
based on the idea of dogma, teaching that you are obligated to accept and not
deliberately question. Some say that atheism is religious - if it is it is
not always religious. For a brand of atheism to be religion it would have
to make a dogma of atheism. If religion
really encouraged you to think for yourself then the pattern would be that each
person moves from one religion to the other and religion would not be saying
that changing dogma when new light comes along showing up faults in it, is wrong. Religion says you must forget your own mind
and follow what God says for God knows better. This attitude is pro-persecution
and sanctions deception – a thing religion is very good at.
Jesus condemned anyone who did not trust God. Offensively, he claimed that if
you have even a bit of faith it can move mountains to bring about good meaning
that the unbeliever cannot and is a blight on the
planet. If you believe in God you have to trust him because you believe he is
an all-good and all-powerful being. If Jesus had had any honesty he would have
said that what such people are doing is doubting not God
but what they are told about God. That cannot be wrong. Yet the Church and he
make out that doubters or deniers are blasphemers for accusing God of lying! We
all doubt so we know from experience that doubt is a part of the learning
experience and there is no progress made without it so it is good not bad. If you will not doubt you will not see if you are wrong. A
religion that forbids doubt is insincere and has stuff to hide.
2) Religion sanctions persecution of those who disagree with it.
Religion says it is a sin not to believe in it. Jesus condemned those who did
not believe in what he said. He said that his miracles proved to the people who
knew him that he was telling the truth about speaking for what God wanted his
people to believe. But what right had he to do that for there could have been
people who they never heard of who were able to do better miracles? Whatever he
did his miracles for it was not in the interest of truth. Jesus was certainly
trying to persecute. He cannot complain then if his followers take up arms to
destroy “heretics”.
3) Religion advocates cold-blooded hatred and dresses it up so that it still
manages to come up smelling of roses. I am referring to its doctrine: “Hate the
sin but love the sinner”. If you hate the sin you must hate the sinner for the
sinner freely commits the sin. Sin cannot be treated separately from the sinner
for it reveals the sinner, it reveals what kind of
person the sinner is. If you hate the
sin you are inflicting pain on yourself because of somebody else’s sin and
claiming that you love the person. But if you separate the sin from the person
like that you are not loving the person for you are treating the person as if
the person never sinned so that is hardly loving the person when sin is
regarded as an enemy. They say that God makes loving the sinner possible by
some sort of miracle but that would be God doing the impossible – doing
something contradictory. No other miracle would have any value as evidence for
his power if he can do that one for his power would make no sense. Whatever miracles prove it is not God.
4) Religion degrades human dignity. It says without being able to prove it that evil results in greater good because God makes sure of
that. In fact it is better for us all to be totally evil than for one person to
die yet they say death is good when it leads to a greater holiness which shows
how totally perverse it is to condone the ways of God. We do not need the God
hypothesis and it is pathologically barbaric to condone evil for it. To do that
is to have no grounds for being against anyone going out of their way to
condone the cruelty of some human tyrant.
5) We all recognise that to keep worrying about what others think of us is a
sign of bad self-esteem yet one of the reasons people are keen on religion is
that it leads to that. You should feel good about doing whatever you think is
right and be dictating your own life. To have a God in your life is to allow
him to decide what is right and wrong for you and that is no different from
worrying about the neighbours and wholly antithetical for self-esteem.
4) Religion takes rights it cannot have for it is just systems based on
guesswork that is in opposition to facts. Any facts it agrees with are agreed with only because
its dogma permits them to be accepted or accepts them. They are not accepted because they are facts.
5) Religion stops you from being true to yourself. Unhappiness and lack of
self-esteem arise from developing too many needs. Only go after important
things like food and drink and shelter and friends for the simpler you keep
things the easier it is for to be happy. Religion is not a need and to need it
is to be a person with a disorder. Religion gives prayer and sacraments and
divine revelations as remedies for the way it makes you feel which work
temporarily and pull you down further so you need further fixes. It is meant to
work the same as a drug addiction but often fails to program people
successfully these days.
6) Religion encourages fear for if you were really free from fear you would not
need religion.
7) Religion demands obedience even when you can see no reason to think that all
of its morals are right.
8) It tells you to serve God when you should be serving only yourself in a
rational way. You cannot make others happy unless you respect yourself only
then can you be of benefit to them. Worship then is pro-irrationalism and
therefore pro-evil and pro-cruelty. Good is used as a bait
for the unwary in religion.
9) Christianity is an example of a religion that has books that God wrote in
which suffering is encouraged. It opposes self-esteem telling you to imagine
that others are better than you (Philippians 2:3). When
Despite his visions, prayers and holiness and sufferings for God,
Religion is bad news. It advocates submission to authority not commonsense. Even “moderate” religion has that in common with religious terrorists.