RELIGION HOLDS GRAVE POTENTIAL FOR DAMAGE TO THE VULNERABLE

Religion is just an organisation and like all organisation should not be simply trusted.  It seems to think it should not be subject to the exacting standards that other organisations are.  Priests and clergy get too much access to the vulnerable in schools and hospitals and in the home.

By religion we mean a system of worship, of doctrine and morals revealed by God, by which God reaches down to us to raise us up to what he wants us to be.

We all recognise that to keep worrying about what others think of us is a sign of bad self-esteem. Yet one of the reasons people are keen on religion is that it is a weapon to control the vulnerable and confused. They are imprisoned at the fear of what others might think of them. You should feel good about doing whatever you think is right and be dictating your own life. To have a God in your life is to allow him to decide what is right and wrong for you and that is no different from worrying about the neighbours and wholly antithetical for self-esteem.

Religion takes rights it cannot have for it is just systems based on guesswork that is in opposition to facts.  Any facts it agrees with are agreed with only because its dogma permits them to be accepted or accepts them. They are not accepted because they are facts.

Religion stops you from being true to yourself. Unhappiness and lack of self-esteem arise from developing too many needs. Only go after important things like food and drink and shelter and friends for the simpler you keep things the easier it is for to be happy. Religion is not a need and to need it is to be a person with a disorder. Religion gives prayer and sacraments and divine revelations as remedies for the way it makes you feel which work temporarily and pull you down further so you need further fixes. It is meant to work the same as a drug addiction but often fails to program people successfully these days.

Religion encourages fear for if you were really free from fear you would not need religion. It uses tricks. Religious people are characterised by worry that society is going off the rails and was kept in check by religion in the good old days so they want religion to be as powerful now as it was then. The media feeds this by focusing on the bad in society. But that bad was always there. Religious believers use the fear to keep a hold on people. Christianity markets itself as being the only solution to many of society's problems. It moans that society is in tatters because there is nothing to unite people as a society meaning no religion. This is nonsense. We should not be united anyway in religion but be united as human beings. Christianity can only be an artificial solution. It's a diversion from the fact that we need to remember that other people are like other selves, just as conscious, just as vulnerable and just as uncertain as ourselves. These considerations should unite people better than people coming together to agree that Jesus is God or the Bible is his word or that the pope is infallible. Religion never unites people. What happens is that people see they are united by their common humanity and they use religion to express that. Religion is never a genuine unifying factor. The unification only happens in spite of the faith not because of it. Sooner or later disintegration happens. Consider how the Catholic Church broke up into separate sects all hating one another and how today liberal Catholics hate the traditional Catholics and are hellbent on pinning crimes on the pope.

Religion demands obedience even when you can see no reason to think that all of its morals are right. It is the idea that God knows better than us what is best for us and often makes rules we don't understand - ie like when the pope begged the Africans not to protect themselves from AIDS with condoms. So if he says it we must obey. Jesus said that we must love God with our whole heart and not love ourselves or anybody else that way and that this was the greatest commandment. His command to love neighbour as oneself is a restriction. You could love somebody perhaps slightly more than yourself but love that person less than God. That is disobedient and a sin and means you don't love God with all your heart. You have to obey him to love him that way. So love neighbour as yourself means: "Love God's rules about how you must be to your neighbour and yourself." It is not a warm thing at all. It is clinical and intimidating. But back to the real point. God comes first so he makes laws that glorify himself the best or get him the best glory and service from us. That should be our concern. We must obey his laws in the hope that he knows how best to promote himself best and get the most worship in this sinful world. We should not think of these laws being best for us for he matters. Our welfare is not the greatest commandment. The worship of God is the greatest commandment.

It tells you to serve God when you should be serving only yourself in a rational way. You cannot make others happy unless you respect yourself: only then can you be of benefit to them. Worship then is pro-irrationalism and therefore pro-evil and pro-cruelty. Good is used as a bait for the unwary in religion. If God is so great, then we should wish we were God above all things. The belief inflicts suffering on us. It is wanting suffering and trying to worsen the inevitable suffering of life.

Christianity is an example of a religion that has books that God wrote in which suffering is encouraged. It implies that if you feel alone and abandoned by God in your suffering that the problem is you for God is with you.  That is a very serious violation of the rapport you deserve. Religion opposes self-esteem telling you to imagine that others are better than you (Philippians 2:3). When St Paul commanded that and the apostles accepted such a dishonest person as a witness to the resurrection that makes us question the resurrection when a lie like that was told for one person is as good as another. Christians are told to believe that they can no good without God helping them all the time for they are so useless (Romans 7). Verses that speak of confidence (Philippians 4:13; 1 Corinthians 11:1) say it comes from God so this confidence is not self-esteem but trusting that God will make good of you though you are useless. To teach that we are precious not because we think so but because God does (1 Peter 1:18,19) is really to say that what we think is useless. So if that is true how can we think we are precious because God thinks it because we have to think God thinks it? The teaching commands blind faith in dogma. If you don’t believe in thinking you cannot really believe in anything for belief is a kind of thinking so the teaching seeks to crush your self-love entirely and leave nothing only self-deception. Any faith that opposes self-esteem is evil.

Despite his visions, prayers and holiness and sufferings for God, St Paul still cried for deliverance from his body of death. He cried for someone to deliver him which means he wished that somebody would murder him. If a saint needed to do that how much more do we need to suffer. He claimed divine inspiration and the Church regards his writings as infallible so this is dangerous.
 
By exaggerating how wrong wrongdoing is, religion provokes our built in tendency to refuse to feel there is any good in the evil that people do. To suggest that even murder does some good makes people's blood boil. Religion invents sins such as missing Mass on Sunday or not celebrating Mass correctly if you are a priest. The atheist who does wrong cannot intend to hurt and offend God by it, so wrongdoing is worse as far as intention goes if you believe in God. So religion enhances evil.
 
Religion gives a delusional experience of meaning in life and insults the experience of those who feel their lives are wholly valuable to them despite religion playing little or no role in them.
 
It says you need to have a relationship with God and to see that you can have this relationship forever to have meaning in life. In fact, if you knew death was the end that would not stop you have a relationship with God now. And the fact is, even if death is the end and there is no God, any good you do is no less valuable. If you saved a baby's life, nothing can make that not have happened. If you don't feel your life has meaning after doing something so good then the problem is with your appreciation of good. It is too low. It is not a specifically religious problem. The problem is you. Religion can only help you delude yourself that you are not the problem.

Religion, especially Christianity, is bad news. It advocates submission to authority not commonsense. Even “moderate” religion has that in common with religious terrorists.  Moderate religion is a spectrum and will oppress or start oppressing in many ways.