A Guide to doing Religion Wrong!

[Runa216]

This thread truly amuses me.

You know, I spent a large majority of my life indifferent to religion. I really did. I live in Canada so we're not that religiously motivated here; I mean, there are religious people and preachers and I live in a very religious community, but for the most part we keep our religion and science/education/politics apart from one another. Spirituality is something very personal, and while my more-or-less analytical brain can't really subscribe to the idea that there's some cosmic greater being out there without proof, I didn't really care that people believed. Hell, many of my friends are religious and we get along fine because they obey the one cardinal rule of common sense and decency: they keep it to themselves.

I didn't really gain a hatred for religion and its influence on the world until I started realizing just how widespread the things in the comic I posted are. Stuff like jehovah's witnesses coming to my door and judging me for not believing what they believe, people who honestly want evolution banned or intelligent design taught alongside it. It's the people who protest gay rights or want women to stay in the kitchen because that's how the bible teaches it. It's all of those people who not only push their beliefs on others, but get away with it because of religious freedoms.

I've said from day one that, if you want influence and you want your beliefs respected, you need to prove them or at least offer a respectable amount of evidence.

Religion is a personal, spiritual connection to your beliefs. You can share them, but keep them out of places where they don't belong. Keep it out of everything that isn't home or church, and SIMPLE! enjoy life! We atheists that use proof and rationality and logic to dictate our lives will live happy lives and you'll do the same.

The reason I fight so aggressively against religion isn't because of the people who understand how to be decent people, but because of the crazy large number that seems to insist the world abide by their outdated morals and beliefs...and are succeeding. I don't want my life dictated by something that has absolutely no factual evidence backing it up. If there was even a small bit of proof that the lofty claims of the bible were true (and we're not talking the super vague examples that require a dozen leaps of logic to get to otherwise rationalized beliefs, nor are we talking the 'well some of the events may be true so that means all of it is' logic that so many exhibit), then I'd respect it more. as it stands, it's nothing more than mythology that entirely too many people foolishly interpret as fact.