Spam

Before I start spelunking the darker bowels of religion, I feel the need to write in a disclaimer. Because I'm lazy, I'll regurgitate the story that I've been using for years to describe practically everything in my life.

When I was a child, a patch of elephant grass separated my subdivision and a closed gate community that existed on the other side. In the middle of this wall of grass was a tunnel hollowed out by the hooligans that came before me. Through this portal, everything was richer. All the lawns were without weeds, no paint was pealing from the walls. All those cars I saw in the movies were zooming down the street. This world was a different world, it was a separate universe I visited whenever I wished. I wasn't alone in my belief. Using the word "gang" is misleading, yet it is the only word I can use to describe us. We dived into the empty culvert systems, peered into store windows, and occasionally did less intelligent things. Here, in this other world, nothing could touch us, because life was perfect.

Years later I visited the subdivision that I used to live in, by chance happening by my old house. When I looked across the yard, I realized the immortal gateway that I had so cherished in my youth had been chopped down, and the reality was laid bare before me. The "perfect" subdivision I had imagined had become a decrepit old residential area. The stores were gone, the culvert filled, and the mystery blew away. The question was then, did this world that I glimpsed in my youth actually ever exist, or was it a complete fabrication?

Like the world through the patch of grass, when I was young, perfection was easy to imagine. Beyond the gates of death I imagined a garden, perfect, and clean. Everything I loved would stay forever, life would always be perfect, and the things that I feared would be banished like a breath on the wind. Believing in God was easy then.

Then belief got hard. Loved ones were lost, and the deeper questions of the mere existence of atrocities began to wear away my faith. Science slammed into my faith like a meteor, declaring the things I once held true to be false. When my prayers were not answered with any speed, my faith dripped away to nothingness.

For many years I looked in on religion from the outside, and saw what I suspect many of the nonreligious see. I saw hate and intolerance. I saw people who gave up everything just so they could attain an illusion. I saw perversion and hypocrisy.

It was different when I rejoined the church. I saw that I had hated people who did not deserve it. I had been intolerant because I had thought that they were intolerant themselves. Yet they were as hurt by the overzealous as much as those outside the religion. They weren't ignorant either. They made the choice to believe in something and ultimately did not seem worse for it. They weren't self-righteous or angry either. They were people. We are people.

So remember when looking at religions that you don't yourself become close minded. Remember that attacking a religion can be completely without merit. This blog is not here to attack any religion, but simply question the practices by some factions within the faiths that seem destructive to society and the faiths themselves.