Why Religion Should Die

            As millions across the globe praise their gods in their own ways, little do they realize that their pledges of allegiance are destroying millions of other people’s lives. As children attend their Sunday schools and mass and faithfully read their Bibles and Qurans, they may not realize that what they are learning is setting them up for a lifetime without thinking, creating the dangerous situations we now find ourselves in. Religion is a monster; a cunning brain-washing technique that exploits the faith of billions each day.
            When I was thirteen years old, I left the world of religion behind. It all started in a Sunday school class, discussing the Bible, particularly Genesis and the “creation of the world.” I, curious and influenced by a biologist father, hinted at what evolution stated, and asked how the Bible could be true if evolution made points that directly contradicted what it stated. The teacher decided not to answer my question, instead refuting it with something along the lines of:
“Just shut up and read your darn Bible!”
            Anytime I had a question or statement following those first few, I always received the same reply (yet no answers). Finally, I got it through my thirteen-year-old brain that they had no answers. It was all a big hoax that people all over the world are falling for. Don’t ask questions, don’t doubt, don’t think. Just believe.
            This leads to the first problem with religion: faith-based thinking. Over time, people are trained by their religion to just have faith in what God says or in what the preachers are telling them that God says. These people can very easily be exploited. This faith-based thinking (non-thinking) is omnipresent, and under certain powers, can become direful. One example of this occurrence can be seen happening right now; a modern-day witch hunt in Africa. Christian priests, performing under such organizations as “Church of God Mission” and “Brotherhood of the Cross,” have brainwashed the people of the Niger Delta so thoroughly that they have parents convinced that their children are witches, causing everything from disease to economic problems. The parents are so convinced of this that they’ve taken to doing anything to get rid of the “witches.” They beat, burn , poison, chase away their own children (and their neighbors’) because they take, on faith, what a bunch of “God’s men” are telling them. Without the influence of these religious leaders, a normal parent would not even consider it possible for their child to be a witch.
            AIDS threatens to take over as one of the world’s deadliest (and did I mention, incurable?) diseases, killing more than 438,795 people in the U.S. to date. One of the most effective ways of preventing the spread of this devastating STD is: a condom. So simple, it seems, yet it is not so. Like food, water, and healthcare, condoms are not readily available to many who need them. Yet many religious causes, particularly in the Catholic faith, willing enough to provide those in need with food, clean water, and basic healthcare, refuse to provide condoms (or any kind of birth control, for that matter) as part of their service. Their reasoning is that condoms go against what “the good lord intended.”
            Because people put so much faith into these religions, they believe everything the leaders are telling them, even if it blatantly contradicts itself, or has no truth that can be logically verified. They claim that because there is no proof that God doesn’t exist means that God does, in fact, exist (Hitchens xxiv). They claim all the stories in the Bible are true, yet how can they be true when there is no proof? There are thousands of religions in the world, and they all claim different things, most of which have no correlation among themselves. Some even contradict each other. With all these un-supported claims that contradict each other and themselves, how is one to say that they are true? They can’t all be true. (Cline). Yet unlike politics or news, the followers don’t doubt the validity of the church for a second. And if they do, they become outsiders.
            Outsiders do not have a place in the world. And with so many different religions floating around, and so many “truths,” everyone is an outsider. Muslims kill Christians for performing non-church related activities (Hitchens), Christians kill thousands of Muslims in the Crusades because they are not of the same religion, Jews are persecuted by the millions, courtesy of the Christians, and wars wage for centuries in the Middle East, all over religious disputes.
            Though many religious types may claim that religion is a good thing, that it gives people something to hold onto, that it instills good morals upon people growing up, that it unites families and communities; there is no way to overlook the pain and suffering that religion inflicts upon the world.



Bibliograpy:

Kimball, Charles. When Religion Becomes Evil. New York: HarperCollins, 2002.

Hitchens, Christopher. The Portable Atheist. Philadelphia: Da Capo Press, 2007.

McVeigh, Tracy. "Children are targets of Nigerian witch hunt." The Observer Dec. 2007: < http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2224553,00.html>.

Cline, Austin. "Religion & Religious Doctrines are Self-Contradictory: How Can They All Be True?." About 2007: <http://atheist.about.com/od/argumentsagainstgod/a/ContraryReligio.htm>.