I've Become Persnickity about my Disbelief

You know, I go through stages. I'm sure we all do, but these stages I'm referring to are the stages of how I feel about belief, religion in particular. Sometimes I can just let go and be all live and let live  about it all, about religion and whatnot. But other times, like now, religion feels like a huge blistering pile of Nefarious Bullshit that doesn't Deserve Protection, much less deference.

Of course, that original statement suggests that there are times when I do not view religion as NBDP. I must here admit that I don't think that is true... I honestly have lost all respect for religion. It is far easier and more common these days for people to express their disdain for religion, in fact it's the issue du jour, and I'm real glad. It's about time. But I'm taking it a happy step further.


Religion has had its day.

I see no redeeming quality of religion.
It harbors abusers. It harbors ignorance. It harbors racists. It harbors misogynists. It harbors bad intentions. It harbors injustice. It maintains an unfair and unbelievable power base in politics and elsewhere. It is steeped in mythology and nonsense. It promotes shame. It wears a mantle of respectability and nobility while earning none of it.

And while I often hear believers say truly ridiculous things like Atheists are actually believers, lately I've been thinking that many people who claim to be religious are truly skeptics running from the truth.

Mirriam-Webster

Open any news site, listen to any news on the radio, even go old-school and open a newspaper and it is obvious that the religious of the world are responsible for warfare, poverty, lack of healthcare for much of the world, racism, sexism, general hatred of any others, beliefs of supremacy, and just so much hatred and chaos. One religion fighting another, one tribe killing another, one race seeking to rule others... Believers in positions of power denying power and rights to others. The absence of peace on this planet can nearly all be colored in by the pencil of tribalism, my belief system and culture is better than yours.

And there is so much more. I think you know what more there is so I don't have to list the many examples of the inherently bad qualities of religions. In fact, there are SO many reasons why I think that religion has had its day. It has become completely superfluous, unnecessary, oily, the antithesis of useful, corrupt, pointless, empty, ...and more words from the thesaurus.

IN SUMMATION

I'm tired of the words like blessing, gift, mystery, ETC being used in language because I find them to be either misleading, to be loaded words that different people mean different thing by, or simply to be saccharine feel-good words that mean absolutely nothing.

I cannot stand the use of them. I'm finding myself a bit riled up about it today and I'm letting off steam right here on my blog because I think that some people who will read this will understand where I am coming from. I'm tired of ubiquitous blessings. I'm annoyed with rampant laziness shows in the absence of critical thought. I'm disgusted with the supposed normalcy of belief.

I'm done with it.
And I hope that soon, within my own lifetime or the lifetime of my children, religion will disappear completely from the common world.

I was listening to The Atheist Experience* the other night, a debate show on YouTube where believers often call in and debate the atheist moderators. The primary chair on the show, Matt Dillahunty, made an amazing, simple, and true comment. I paraphrase: If today something happened to destroy all religion and all knowledge in human beings and we all had to start fresh with our knowledge and/or superstition beliefs, eventually the scientific knowledge would be restored exactly as it is because it is true and provable whereas religion might, again, be created, but it would be a completely different set of mythologies. Because it would all be created by future human beings.

I am a person who is very deliberate with my language usage no matter what I am discussing. I have become very very punctilious about any of these words used by the religious of the world to sound cute or spiritual or pious or righteous. I seldom respond to anything on FB that uses religious language at all because I find it lazy, meaningless, fulsome, sanctimonious, phony, deluded, or glib.
I am done. 

Where are you on this issue?
Still offering deference to the church?

* It's possible, LIKELY, I would be less angry 

if I was listening to something else...  😁

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