Stay At Home Vagabond

I don’t “despise” religious people. I even have a few friends who believe in a god. I do think everyday believers and religious folk are pretty deluded, ranging from just plain fucking stupid (at least in this respect) to totally insane; but I wouldn’t say I despise them. It’s the religious institutions, clergymen, evangelicals, and people in power who use religion as a tool to manipulate the masses who I truly despise. The problem with the everyday believers, though, is that they are the ones who help perpetuate this nonsense and keep it alive in the minds and hearts of the collective consciousness. As long as people are keeping religion around, the powers that be have an easy means of controlling everyone into attacking their fellow humans, whether it be by denying basic rights to homosexuals, opposing a woman’s right to choose, not trusting atheists, hating those who don’t prescribe to the same religion as them, or distrusting science. Throughout history, religion has been used to support slavery, to kill thousands, and even to fly planes into buildings.
The awful part of people “believing in something” is that they rarely keep it at that. Very few people are merely theistic; they have to prescribe to an organized religion, go to buildings dedicated to cultist worship and indoctrination, send their kids to private schools that teach only their religious point of view, have their deity on our currency, have it on their cars, have their books in every hotel room, try to get prayer in schools, omit lyrics from songs by John Lennon when they’re sung at baseball games, stand outside of Planned Parenthood and yell at women that they’re murderers, lobby against homosexuality, place little propaganda pamphlets at every payphone around the country, et cetera, et cetera. If you want to believe in some vague higher power and keep it to yourself, go for it. But let’s be honest: most believers aren’t doing that. And even if you aren’t directly part of some of the examples I just listed, you are complicit in this insanity just by being one of the majority who hasn’t overcome this outdated belief in archaic mythology.
There’s nothing wrong with hope. But religious people aren’t just hoping; they’re knowing with all certainty. Most people who worship and believe not only think they’re right and that their book/deity is 100% infallible, but they believe wholeheartedly that everyone else is 100% wrong. This is where hope becomes faith, which is literally believing in something without reason. It’s this social acceptance of ignorant bliss and lack of reasoning that has in many ways stunted our growth and evolution not only as a society but as a species. It puts planes through buildings, causes attempted genocides on a certain group of people, gets people killed over who they’re in love with, scares women into having babies they aren’t prepared for, traumatizes kids like me into fearfully obeying, gets children molested by priests and those priests subsequently protected, keeps Africans without contraceptive and rife with HIV, gets an entire population of people enslaved based on color, has people more concerned with predicted last days rather than the today and tomorrow. The list of atrocities committed in the name of religion goes on and on.
In a world with such a vast amount of complex beauty and information to explain that beauty without devaluing it, we as a species have long-since surpassed the necessity for fairy tales and beliefs in invisible higher powers. We should be worshiping something more tangible and involved in our everyday lives, like nature, or science, or each other. Until religion and naive, irrational beliefs like that of in gods have been erased, we will continue to stand still as a people.

— uglyuglyugly.tumblr.com, when asked about what’s so wrong with religion. Perfection. (via significantlyunknown)