Here as I sit, knocked off my feet by a bad cold during a wet rainy day, thoughts spring up about one of my most detested elements of this world: those excessively “pious” people. These come in such a great variety, and as much as I love variety, this isn't the kind I like.
Once, some guys thought that it would be a great idea to take the common people's only source of hope and turn it into their own source of wealth. I can't be too precise to say whom, but I'm sure they shall recognise themselves in my words. They would crush the only value of religion to see if it made gold. Their materialist intentions and desires turn them into monsters of the human race, worse than the worst of crooks and cons. They would abuse the trust of billions of men, women and children just for some sort of compensation. Popoff and his powers, people? And the worst thing about it all is that I'm sure you could never pull out a single string of truth from their mouths, not even to save their own lives because honesty is inexistant in the minds of liars.
Others do pretty much the same thing, but more for special favours and power than money. Wasn't christianity born on the principle of humility? What the hell is the Pope and his esses doing in a huge palace down in their own state? Would it make a big difference to Jesus if his churches were more laden in gold than a top of the charts rapper's toilet?
Some are just all out maniacs who got religion all wrong. Why on earth would God want you to kill others of your kind if supposedly he wants peace? Muhammed got pissed off at some posers checkin' his land, so he decided to get all litterary on their asses and wrote a new rule about getting to kill someone who opposes himself to Muhammed's power. How godly. A group of dudes get in a car, drive up really fast to the motorway, blow themselves up, and for what? Some doubtable hope that you'll get more poon in heaven than on earth?
Wackos got their shit all wrong when they sought out the use of religion as a way to enslave the people and build some sort of common moral values in a society whose's ones weren't good enough for them. I hate quoting communists, but religion really IS the people's opiate. Would those guys still have written a big book if they saw the harm their fantastic foundations to a utopic society did? Maybe they should've thought about making the stories a little less sublte instead of giving people the idea that the first men appeared 10,000 years ago with a couple of candid idiots. What the fuck? Dinosaurs?
I don't know about you, but I think a constitution is a better idea to found a country instead of a fucking science fiction novel.
Get your shit together people.
Red
I think you're only seeing the negative aspects of religion. True, there are and have always been many douches around there to take advantage of it; but it was never meant to be that way, and it's certainly not the fault of the guys who wrote the "big book". They weren't trying to build an Utopian society, and they sure as hell didn't even knew dinosaurs existed. They couldn't be more subtle because they truly believed the stories they wrote, word by word : it is only very recently that institutions emphasize the "message-only" meaning of the texts, because of all the scientific findings that question the liability of the text and because of the predictable skepticism of the ordinary foe.
ReplyDeleteAnd despite all the harm that may have been caused throughout the ages using religion as a pretext, it is in its essence a good thing, and for a long, long time, it was, as you said, if not the only source of hope of the common people, at least the main one. It is the founding stone of the western culture and society; and as with all things which imply power, religion can be and was many times used for bad intentions; but then again, almost everything good can be used with bad intentions. In the end, it is a fundamental, inherent thing of the human nature and way-of-being, and as that changed throughout History, so did religion. Take Protestantism as an example : they didn't like the Pope nor the materialistic aspect of Christianity as well, did they? You can't say religion is stupid, it's just there, whether you like or not.