I grew up the son of a pastor. In short, that’s the definition of hell. Whether constantly living life trying to break the stereotypes of the “rebellious PK,” or having every mistake you make magnified to umpteenth degree because of your “calling,” the tolerance for church people decrease day by day. Throughout my life I’ve been told these stories, constantly told that God is a jealous God, and that we shouldn’t have any other gods before him. Meanwhile, for us lowly humans envy is a sin and without repentance we’d get sent straight to hell for it...Trust me, this is not an article preaching to the atheists who have a problem with organized religion. This is about how religion has forced us to lose focus of the very things that actually matter.
Rules and regulations, that is what the church (all churches) have become. From the outside looking in, people call us sheep, say we’re blindly following along because religion is just a form of control. There was a point in my life when I thought that was just some sort of conspiracy theory, and a part of me still does. However, there is not much distinction between their theory and the truth.
As with most bad things there are some good takeaways: Religion creates guidelines for its followers, and order is pretty much always a good thing. Religion creates a standard for how followers treat their neighbors, and no, you don’t have to be religious to treat people around you with respect, but we’re discussing the good things here. All in all, religion gives people hope when things are terrible, and honestly, having something to believe in when times get tough and there seems to be no end to what you’re going through is an amazing thing.
The duality of loving God and hating religion are not far-fetched or impossible simply because religion has turned into the exact antithesis of what I consider God to be. The church wants to preach that God is love and acceptance, and we can’t even get along with the church down the street because their “rules” are different. We can’t accept people because they are homosexuals, they have different lifestyles, they don’t follow your bible to a T.
Life is not about highlighting sins of others to diminish your own. Yes, a person may be gay, you may not like it and quote every scripture to defend your beliefs. However, the bible also talks about lying, I’m sure you do that. If we legitimately followed biblical principles, there would be a lot of food we couldn’t eat and a whole lot of things that we consider normal now that just couldn’t be done.
At the end of the day, no matter what religion you follow we need to be better helpmates to our neighbors, forget about our differences, and figure out what similarities we have rather than what divides us. Whatever your end goal may be -- Heaven, Nirvana, Mummification -- we can’t keep discussing love and acceptance while we do the exact opposite. We all have our struggles and no two struggles will ever be the same, but I believe that being whatever religion you are is all about using whatever greater being you believe in to allow you to get you through those struggles and to give you a model to live by. Do you need it? No, to each their own. However, I am sick of the hypocrisy and discord within religious circles and how those different churches and denominations interact with the world around them because of their differences.
Simply put, no one’s ever going to step foot into a church if they feel like they're being judged for what they truly believe is correct. One of my favorite stories of the bible is when all these guys find this adulterer in the street and during the times, it was punishable by law to stone adulterers. Jesus sees this and he basically says whoever has never sinned ever, throw the first stone. Not only do none of the guys throw stones... Jesus himself doesn’t throw one.
The very person that some people want to be just like also had struggles and problems and he never walked around as if he was better than you and me. Religion can no longer be used as a scapegoat for lack of respect and bigotry, nor hate crimes, or ridiculous protests. Just like anything else, it should and can change with the times, but it won’t unless we allow it to. Respect differences, respect each other, help each other, because with or without religion, this world will not function without love, respect, and acceptance.
