Faith is Fear

Religion is the systematic marketing of fear.

Blessed are the poor (donate heavily). Blessed are the meek (obey). Blessed are the humble (don’t question authority). Blessed are the hungry (make us rich while you starve). Blessed are the merciful (if you catch us doing something wrong, let it go). Blessed are the pure of heart (switch off your brain). Blessed are the timid, the cowardly, the fearful.
Blessed are those who give us their power and become our slaves. Muahahaha!

That’s the kind of nonsense religion pushes on people. They train you to turn your back on courage, strength, and conscious living. This is stupidity, not divinity.

Religion will teach you to fear being different, to fear standing up for yourself, and to fear being an independent thinker. It will erode your self-trust by explaining why you’re unable to successfully manage life on your own terms: You are unworthy. You’re a sinner. You’re unclean. You belong to a lesser caste. You are not enlightened. Of course the solution is always the same — submit to the will of an external authority. Believe that you’re inadequate. Give away your power. Follow their rules and procedures. Live in fear for the rest of your life, and hope it will all turn out okay in the end.

When you practice faith instead of conscious living, you live under a cloak of fear. Eventually that cloak becomes so habitual you forget it’s even there. It’s very sad when you reach the point where you can’t even remember what it feels like to wield creative freedom over your own life, independent of what you’ve been conditioned to believe.

Faith is the coward’s substitute for courage. It’s also really good marketing if you’re the one who controls the faith. If you’re afraid or unwilling to assume total responsibility for your life, you’re a perfect match for religion.

Fear in one part of your life invariably spreads to all other parts — you can’t compartmentalize it. If you find yourself frustrated because you’re too afraid to follow your dreams, to talk to members of the opposite sex, to speak up for yourself, etc., then a good place to start is to rid your life of all religious nonsense. Don’t let fear get a foothold in your consciousness.

Stop trying to comfort yourself by swallowing religious rubbish. If you really need something to believe in, then believe in your own potential. Put your trust in your own intellect. Stop giving away your power.

Dump the safety-in-numbers silliness. Just because a lot of people believe stupid stuff doesn’t mean it isn’t stupid. It just means that stupidity is popular on this planet. When people are in a state of fear, they’ll swallow just about anything to comfort themselves, including the bastion of stupidity known as religion.

1 comment:

  1. A standing ovation for this essay. A standing ovation. I return on very rare occasions to Christadelphian houses of worship, and listen to the awful music and the droning interminable sermons, and I think, "This does not constitute being alive."

    I belonged to different Christadelphian churches over several decades, and one in particular was run by an iron-fisted firebrand who on occasion yelled and blustered and cowed the other members into submission. To defy him was to defy God, or so we consciously or unconsciously believed. How and why we came to internalize such thinking is still a mystery to me, because he was simply an old dragon, using the church as his private club in which to bully and shove people around, because it made him feel important. This behavior would have been tempered if he had ever shown any real compassion toward us or any genuine interest in our welfare and lives. It never, ever happened, in my experience. Finally, a member began sending the firebrand anonymous letters, listing scriptures pointing out the moral errors in his behavior. She lived in terror that he would discover her identity, but, in retrospect, and despite responding to him anonymously, she nonetheless exhibited bigger balls than the men in the ecclesia, who cringed in fear whenever he raised his voice. He even left the church and worshipped elsewhere for a time, then returned for a period of time, but finally retired to another part of the country. The member who sent the letters struggled morally with an imagined need to disclose her identity to him; I told her that her anxieties were wasted worry, and I strongly dissuaded her from stepping forward. Mr. Man would have promptly detached her head from her body. He even had one of his stooges get up in the pulpit and denounce the person sending the letters as "having jeopardized their salvation and having a moral need to come forward to confess their sin." Jesus H. Christ. It was in that moment that I thought to myself, "This place is simply a dog and pony show, and there is no reason why these people should cripple themselves by participating in this religion." And shortly afterward, I began defecting out of "The Truth," because I had achieved the clarity of vision necessary to see that it was simply a feigned form of living, a deathtrap scented by coercion and peer pressure and fear. The old monster finally died of prostate cancer. In a church parking lot, I later quietly asked one of the more genteel and elderly ladies in the ecclesia what she thought of his death and his contribution to Christadelphianism. She held her handkerchief up to her face and whispered, "I am reluctant to say it, but I think it was entirely appropriate that it was prick cancer that killed him."

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