On religion

First of all, let me explain my thoughts on religion and spirituality. I don't believe in god(s), I don't believe that there is anything supernatural hovering over us and that we go anywhere after death. I think Richard Dawkins is a complete dick but at least he makes sense. I'm very much against religious institutions, state religion, teaching religion lessons of any sort to children and the molly cuddling of religious people in the society.

Contrary to what many may think, I actually grew up in fairly religious surroundings. My grand dad is a vicar and as I spent a lot of time around him, was obviously subject to a good bit of religious tradition. My mother was a slightly more modern Christian and she never really made me or my brother do anything religious.

I've always been a fairly logical person. When I was younger I remember being scared of monsters when the lights in my room were turned off but I could often reason to myself that as I had never seen monsters and my parents told me there were none, there was a pretty good chance that they didn't exist. When I was around six I decided that this was to be the same about God. When I was a teenager, I learned about other religions but they did not convince me either.

A couple of weeks ago a conversation took place between myself and a couple of other people. Most of these people had previously put forward their anti-religious views. As with myself they disliked religion having such a high status in society but also nearly despised people who were religious. One of them had later changed their mind and recognised some situations (eg. war) in which religion might be beneficial for the welfare of people.

As I stated earlier, religion is really not my cup of tea and IMO should not be of any reasonable person's either. I find it very hard to interact with people who believe in all sorts of toothfairy like creatures with absolutely no unbiased, scientific evidence to support their claims. Would you trust me if I went about believing that leprechauns existed and should be worshipped?

Having said that, I have seen faith change people's lives and make things better for them, not due to some magical power from up above but the fact that they got their life back on track because they had faith even if it was to a non-existent creature(s). I've seen people survive through rough times because they had their faith. I've seen something positive come out of it.

Yeah so that's all nice and dandy for those people. If it works for you, it works for you. One might even say that who am I to tell what people should do to survive or be happy.

What I don't accept in this whole thinking is the fact that it trains people to be weak. If you have to hold on to some sort of supernatural creature you haven't seen (that you can scientifically prove), you have a problem. If you can't handle unhappiness without talking to this creature and not, say, a real person, you have a problem. If you are afraid of dying so much that you sign up for religion, well, that's just a bit pathetic.

The worst part of all this is of course the fact that children all over the world are brought up to trust in the same bs as their parents. No wonder there are so many absolutely useless people out there.

If you are offended by what I've just written, please do not contact me, I really don't care for your religious views and conversion attempts. If you have some sort of interesting point to make about the actual point of this post, feel free to elaborate.