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Me and my boyfriend had co-wrote this essay together on why we both reject religion. We just put I's in the essay instead of "We". I thought I'd share it with you guys. :'D It took us a few days to discuss most of the issues and gather it into a nice essay. We like writing essays just for fun even if we're out of school razz
Warning: lots of writing!
But of course, it is an essay. :')
The continued existence of religion in our society is problematic for a number of reasons. Religion tends to mislead people, almost by definition, and promotes a stubborn mindset that rejects reality and rational thought. Religion also exploits the gullibility of young children to make its farfetched ideas seem reasonable as they become adults, and then plays on fear of the unknown to prevent them from questioning it. It breeds organized attempts to corrupt the government and vandalize legitimate efforts toward learning and research, as well as a general sentiment of distrust toward those who do not accept it. Religious “officials” gain widespread credibility and trust from the believing majority, in subjects on which they may not be trustworthy or even knowledgeable; in fact, in some cases, religion even causes completely imaginary characters to gain trust and appreciation for things they did not do. Even at a philosophical level, these are among my primary reasons for rejecting both the claims and society's continued acceptance of religion.
One of the reasons I am at odds with religion is that it generally holds no truth value. Many people, especially as they are growing up, are challenged by their own deep, meaningful questions about life, humanity, and the universe. Religions notice this, and provide them with invented answers with no solid reasoning or evidence behind them, besides “it's what God said,” or “God made things that way.” At an intellectual level, I strongly disagree with this practice; in my eyes, it's a cop-out from finding the “real” answers to such questions, which tend to be much more interesting and profound than the ones provided by religions.
This turns into a bigger problem than it may seem, but in reality, people tend to tenaciously cling to the answers given to them by religion, even when the real answers to these difficult questions begin to fall within our reach. Questions like “how did humans come about?” and other such questions about our origins can be answered via the scientific method, with
proper evidence; however, despite the successful efforts of astronomers, biologists, chemists, archaeologists, and many other scientists—despite a rich fossil record, and plenty of other pieces of empirical evidence and theories that are the fruits of the hard work of scientists and researchers, the religious majority in our society rejects these findings because they already have “answers,” and they don't seem to care that they're not necessarily true or valid.
Ethical questions like “how should we behave toward each other?” can be answered by rational thought, introspection, observation, and philosophical discussion, without appealing the the supernatural; however, those who deny religion are bizarrely looked down upon by religious society as “immoral,” if only because their morals come from more secular (and arguably better) sources than ancient religious texts. Faith in general, that is, belief without proper evidence, is something that at least empirically minded people can agree is wrong. In these ways, religion prevents people from thinking clearly about these important subjects, and that's something I find terrible and worthy of rejection.
The reason so many people will accept the far-out claims that religion has to offer is that they were raised with a supernatural perception of reality from a very young age. Right from birth, we humans try to make sense of the workings of the world around us, learning how to interact with things
and satisfying our very human curiosity and desire to understand things. Unfortunately, for most of us, this curiosity is filled with fairy tales about God, heaven, and magic, while we're still ripe for accepting it. This indoctrination is, of course, necessary for religion to be accepted at all; if children weren't "brainwashed” into their parents' beliefs like this so early on in life, there certainly wouldn't be as many otherwise intelligent and rational people willing to believe in religious claims about god and the
afterlife.
As a nonbeliever, I find the idea of an invisible magical man that sends you to burn as punishment for misbehaving to necessarily be either primitive or childish. However, when religious people are challenged on the absurdity of these beliefs, their reaction (in my experience) tends to be
one of the following: they get offended, they make up excuses to justify their beliefs, or they generally express some form of discomfort—and this is certainly to be expected, considering that these have been part of their perceptions of the world for their whole lives, and their reaction is likely a defense mechanism of the brain to avoid dealing with the ramifications of having been wrong about the nature of the universe for so long.
Additionally, the method by which many religions are forced on children is fear; religion instills the fear of questioning beliefs by promising punishment to those who disbelieve. However irrational these ideas are, young children are gullible enough to believe them without question, and because of the nature of the beliefs and their methods of playing on fear, they perpetuate into adulthood. Regardless, both the realization that childhood indoctrination was the only reason I'd ever considered religion to be true at any point in my life, and my disgust at the practice itself and the fact that it's so commonplace, are certainly reasons to want to reject religion.
Religion tends to find it way into places it shouldn't be welcome, especially government. In the United States, this is especially true. Religious groups (especially Christian ones) are often trying to use the government to push their views onto the general population; this is something one might think
would be against the spirit of the founding of the country, but we see it happening very often. It is common to see efforts made to have religious doctrine taught in public schools, to pass legislation to impose religious morality that infringes on the rights of others, and to hinder the efforts of honest scientific progress.
To make matters worse, these efforts succeed all too often, because it is extremely difficult for nonbelievers (at least those who are honest about it) to get elected to public office. This is an unfortunate result of the religious propaganda, spread to those who believe it, that “atheists are immoral scum,” which must be an effort meant to keep followers from considering disbelief and to make them shun those who do not believe. As it stands, this sentiment causes religiosity to take a much larger role in most people's consideration of political candidates than it should.
From early on in human civilization, religion has been used as a means of achieving authority and power. Those who claimed to have some sort of special status with this powerful “god” were able to influence those who bought their story, and understandably so. It is somewhat disheartening,
however, that thousands of years later, religion still manages to be a springboard to credibility and authority. When scientific research makes some sort of breakthrough with ethical implications, it's all but certain that religious leaders will end up being called upon to comment on the morality of whatever has been done. Given the far from stellar track record of religion, this might come at first as a surprise to an enlightened person; why would someone involved in religion of all things be called upon as an
authority on what is “moral,” before, say, a philosopher or a sociologist? It only makes sense in the context that the majority of the population actually believes that this person has some sort of
connection with “higher forces.”
Again, it is disheartening that professions whose purposes are to mislead the masses are still thriving in modern times. Another place that religion is clearly unwelcome is the realm of science. This is intuitively obvious to anyone who knows that something faith-based is incompatible with something evidence-based, since science represents belief in things that have been logically proven with evidence and tested to be valid by other scientists, while faith is (often illogical) belief without evidence. Perhaps
organized religion sees the rise of modern science as a threat to their continued existence, as there seem to be organizations that all but vandalize the world of legitimate scientific research.
“Creationism” advocates are especially guilty of this, with some well-funded efforts to flood us with pseudoscience that supposedly contradicts the well-established scientific theory of evolution, that is, a theory well supported by solid evidence and clear logic. The thought that there are such organized efforts to discourage honest learning by the most objective, unbiased, and reliable method of acquiring reliable and useful knowledge we know, the scientific method, does not sit very well with me at all. Religion also gathers lots of misdirected appreciation for the character of “God.”
All too often, God is credited with and thanked for saving the lives of the sick or injured, leading sports teams to victory, providing a family with food, and so on, when the real thanks should be going to the doctors
responsible for working hard applying their knowledge and training to cure their patients, the coaches and athletes responsible for formulating a strategy and winning the game, and all the farmers and laborers that played a part in producing the food, all the way up to the person who prepared and cooked it.
I personally would find it rude and insulting, were I a doctor responsible for saving someone's life, for that person to abruptly ignore my efforts and direct all of his or her appreciation to his or her magical imaginary friend. After all, this “God” fellow is, even to people of faith, someone of whom we cannot be certain of the existence; whereas we can be sure that the actual people responsible for these deeds do exist. A similar practice is for people to pray to God on behalf of loved ones in need (even
though this has been proven ineffective), rather than actually going to them and supporting them. Praying to and thanking an imagined god for worldly matters seem to be yet more religion-oriented cop-outs from showing actual appreciation or concern to real people. Perhaps without religion, people could be more genuine toward each other.
Religion is responsible for the widespread acceptance of unjustified answers to some of life's greatest mysteries. It uses methods that could only be called underhanded tricks to keep the seed of belief present in people's minds, trying even to exploit government and spread misinformation about science, as well as other branches of learning, to impose the religious doctrines on everyone, religious or not. It gives people undue credibility and credit, and it distracts many of us from what is real in favor of the imaginary and supernatural. It saddens me that not only is it the norm for religion to be present in today's world, but it makes up the majority of the population. For these reasons, I think religion can almost certainly be found deplorable, and definitely worthy of rejection.
Sorry for some of the breaks in the sentences. It didn't copy so well over from the pdf. ^^;
Enjoy! <3
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