FAITH vs RELIGION

Good Evening!

In Christopher Hitchens controversial book, God Is Not Great, he writes an indictment a case against God as the biggest perpetrator of hatred and murder in the civilized world. And although he makes a salient point that the death of so many innocents has been name of God, he looses the main argument( i believe) that it is not God that is to blame, but that it is man and his institutions that misunderstands the whole point of religion and therefore has made a mockery of it.

So the case I am about to layout is quite clear and straight forward. Faith is a belief system in which its participants recognize it ideas and precepts and conclude that is is a good way to lead a life affirming existence on Earth. They have complete free will in how they live by these ideas and are totally responsible for their actions. Religion on the other hand is a political system set up with a rigid set of rules and laws within a structured framework with a hierarchy to carry them out.

Within the faith system, you are on your own, you decide (based on your upbringing) the most basic of rules. What is right or wrong, good and bad, not black or white, but understanding the nuances that help you distinguish and navigate the differences. Religion on the other hand also helps you understand that there is good and evil in the world, the difference being they (through their peer pressure) dictate all the rules of engagement and therefore usurp you if the joy and responsibility of knowing the real differences and therefore blind you to some very important facts. Even within the structured religion of Judaism, it is a stated fact that all righteous people will have a share in the "world to come". There is no requisite for converting to their faith to earn the right to this after-life, in fact of all the worlds major religions, they discourage proselytizing, the finding of converts. All of the other major religions encourage, even demand fealty to their faith as the price for access to this special place!

Religion defines what is good and bad and therefore when it comes to killing of another human being (the word is murder as distinguished from kill). Who is considered OK to kill. We certainly do not want to kill the good people. The good (white) vs the bad (black, brown, yellow) you get the picture. Or there are the good blacks and the bad yellows, or any other group or individual they deem worthy of living. Religions like governments dictate who is good and who is evil. Faith has no such dictates. They only demand honestly, integrity and a high ethical center to participate and even on these bedrock values they have some wiggle room. There are religions out there who have no compunction about telling you who should be killed, and rail against persons or even other religions to drive home the point.

Do you get where I am going here. Is it starting to sink in. I am not indicting any specific religion (although I think you know who you are), rather I am making the distinction between faith based living and religion based living and showing you the inconsistencies and the danger of the latter. If you think of the histories of the world, their culture, mores and religions it is becoming painfully clear that there is huge elephant in the living room of the world. It can no longer be ignored on the pain of wholesale flight of peoples away from organized religions and this is a problem.

First, religion is not necessarily all that bad, it isn't all that good either. Religion, especially when we are young can be a character building experience, it can give us the values and ideas to be better people and therefore better citizens and stewards of this fragile place called Earth. The problem as I see it lays in the organization of religion and the humans who run it. We have leaders that have strayed far from the ethical path down a road of their own making, filled with all the all to common frailties we have come to identify with all the ills we encounter on a daily basis. All too often the rules are twisted or worse corrupted to make them all but unrecognizable and that makes them all the more deadly. Any religion that preaches superiority over another, or encourages its adherents to commit killings in the name of their God not only diminishes their Deity but also turns the dictates of their religion into meaningless dribble unintelligible to only the least of them who would follow any fools world into hell!

Second, even if your give religion its due as a framework of ethical living, you have to take the crap with carnations. And in so doing you have negated any good that could have become from teaching our youth the difference between right and wrong, good and bad. They only learn a warped version of life which could never serve them in good steed. So now we understand that man inspired religion is a corruption of man's search for meaning, stifling all human achievement and that faith, opens the doors of our minds to endless possibilities and to a better, endless and joyful future.

So what we have is a Mexican stand off so to speak. Well not really, what we have is a clear choice, either take religion full strength as is with all its foibles, warts and all. Or we have our faith, based on the true, good tenants of our religion. Stripped of all its mendacity's, double talk, hypocrisy, faith gives us all we need to be the people we were meant to grow up to be within the context of a world, not of out making, allowing for a Creator or not, but acknowledging the possibility that something bigger than us does exist, that makes all we see, feel, do and create seem a little inspired (in spirit) and therefore beyond the human mind to comprehend.

Have a great week,

Robb