Another one of my controversial mood-swings that I have on here every couple months where I say something spiritually detrimental and then go back to normal a couple days later.
Is religion really needed in the world? The purpose of most all religions in the world--in a very broad sense--is to better mankind by offering some type of moral guidance along with mystical and/or Sacramental grace and some special path that will lead to eternal bliss or something. They all claim to be the solution to fix mankind of its problems. But this is also their biggest flaw. If certain people do not entirely adhere to their solution, then that religion condemns them and only promotes more hatred and problems in the world. In a sense, all religions are in a capitalistic rivalry with each other to hold a monopoly on the market--in this case, the market is peoples' souls, and to put their competition (other religions) out of business through promoting petty nationalistic patriotism among their adherents so that their adherents will shun and hate the other religion, thus just promoting rivalry and hatred in society. Instead of really fixing any problems, it only makes things worse.
Maybe the Marxists were right that religion is the opium of the people because it prevents any societal progress from ever being made and promotes people to submit to the bourgeois--which in this case, is the leaders of the particular religion, who in turn pollute the people by telling them to just accept the way things are in the world and focus on this theoretical next world that may or may not exist. Go ahead, let the world burn, screw it! Let the children starve and the poor suffer, stay being sheep taken advantage of by the rich! Because if you listen to me and follow the rules I give you, then someday you will have paradise at this big place in the sky where you will see all your dead family and friends!
Why do we focus so much on this next transcendant world that may or may not exist when we cannot even handle our own world that we are in now? Why don't we just try to fix this world instead of worrying about the next and if another world does exist after death, then we can handle it then instead of further screwing our present world to worry about this next world? I'm starting to find Marxism as being more of a practical philosophy of the world because it seeks to make real, applicable change that can be made into a reality right now. We can create the perfect utopia right here on Earth right now if we really tried. Isn't this nobler than the goal of religions which only focus on the next world at the expense of our present world?
Really, religions seem to only poison modern society. Take Evangelical missionaries for example. They go into these really backwards parts of the world, and instead of teaching them how to meet their basic needs and form a stable society, they only give them even more problems to face. Now not only do these native people have to suffer with poverty, disease, warfare and other natural disasters, but now they have to worry about what some magic guy in the sky thinks of them and they have to jump through hoops to please him even though He has never done anything for them yet this narcissist still demands eternal praise from everyone in the entire universe just to satisfy His godly ego because apparently an all-powerful God who is perfect still needs the eternal praise from something as petty as humans to satisfy His narcissistic ego. Talk about insecurity! God seems like the popular but insecure teenage girl in High-School who needs to constantly be told that she is pretty by the nerdy guys who are infatuated with her that she would never even date or give the time of day to.
Guess what guys! Even though you are miserable in this world, if you do not start worshipping this invisible guy in the sky, then you will also face eternal misery when you die at a level so great that it would make your earthly pain right now seem like a walk in the park! Great! So you want to worship Him and get with the plan? Perfect! We'll tell you what you have to do! You now have to accept our western censorship and ideals that will butcher your heathen, subhuman non-European culture because we have it all figured out and carry the White man's burden of civilizing you brown/black skinned monkeys! So let us now tell you how you have all been living in sin for hundreds of years. All of your women are whores because they expose their chests and wear little clothing opposed to our Victorian standards even though there was no sexual intent in it at all, you have to obey our rules about how you have sex and how many people you can marry, and now you have to start hating homosexuals and letting us exploit your land of its natural resources and enslave you!
I do not know who I despise more. Evangelicals or the Roman Catholic Church. I hate seeing another Mexican who is a Roman Catholic. It is just a sign of weakness accepting colonialism. I'd rather them be Marxists and focus on making a real difference in the world, or even return back to Aztec neo-paganism than adhere to the religion that was forced upon them. I imagine that Lenin felt the same way about seeing fellow Russians who were Orthodox. I sympathize for him.
So tell me again how religion helps anyone? It just introduces new problems on people who are already suffering, impedes upon any progress ever being made in society and as we will now discuss, only promotes more hatred, distance and intolerance among the world. I hate how religion can honestly condemn a perfectly good person to the fires of Hell just for not adhering to that particular religion even though they could have been one of the greatest persons in the world. Ask an Evangelical what they think of John Lennon, Gandhi, Siddhartha Gautama (The Buddha) or some other great, peace-loving person who wanted to make a difference in the world and most assuredly I tell you that the Evangelical will say that these people are still evil and are in Hell right now because they did not formally 'believe' in this God guy. I do not think it is a coincidence that some of the most spiritually enlightened, peace-loving people were irreligious.
Religion seems like an inferior stage in a person's moral development. Among the people who only judge goodness by whether someone 'believed' in God or not and accepted the way things are in our world. However, to be fair, this is mostly just among western Christianity, although I see it to an extent in Orthodoxy. While on the other hand, eventually more enlightened people rise above this childish disposition and pursue peace and righteousness for what it truly is denying the silly hindrance that religion places on them.
I want peace. I want utopia. I want an end to suffering. And there are many people who also wanted the same thing and advocated a message about this. How is it that these religions can be so undeveloped that they would actually condemn these people of such noble ideals just because they did not formally belong to their religion or 'believe' in a particular diety? If their God is a god who hates peace loving people who are so morally great just because they do not believe in Him, then that is a pretty lousy god. Bob Marley, Tupac and John Lennon would make better gods than a God like that. At least they had proper ideals. Religion only promotes hatred because it gives people pride over other types of people, further separates us as humans by causing differences and quarrels among us, and on top of that, impedes any earthly progress in society and condemns people who love peace just because they did not formally belong to that religion.
I acknowledge that radical atheism has also led to evil and impedes upon progress in society. So I am not in anyway advocated that. Radical atheism reduces humans to naturalistic animals with no morality, thus making the idea of progress or utopia meaningless, and the notion of evolutionary natural selection and Ayn Rand's objectivism only acts as an idea to justify the bourgeois exploiting the poor without feeling shame. It is another threat to earthly utopia.
I think that nontheism is better than atheism because it rejects the silly differences and problems that religion raises, but also reject the deprivation that atheism brings. It promotes people to still strive for goodness but to do it without the hindrance that comes from religion. Is Marxism perhaps a better worldview because it seeks to create a utopia now instead of just being lazy sheeping and waiting for the next world?
Thoughts?