Religion, the Old Opiate. OMG.

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I was recently looking up the name of someone on the Internet, and it just so happened that there were numerous people with that name.  And --and this is the sad part-- most of them were evangelists!!!  What a sad thing it is that in this day and age, so many are wasting their time with religion!

Long after I gave up believing in miracles and Divine Intervention, I kept up a facade of being religious.  I often wondered, in later times, why I kept on with it, and it seemed to me that I was trying to set an example for my friends and younger people.

An example of what?  What is so admirable in clinging to what is nothing but a set of well-intentioned lies?

People who admired me --if there were any-- would have got the message that it was a good thing to profess belief in something even if one did not believe.  (I'm firmly convinced that my skepticism was very poorly disguised.)

People who despised me would have nodded to themselves, thinking that it was this pretense of religiosity that was my ruin.  I was not doing a service to religion.

One of my friends finally argued successfully that life was too short to profess something you did not believe, and I finally came out.  It was a huge relief; but it immediately frustrated me that it was obvious that the vast majority of professed believers were not believers at all.  Of course, there is no way we can be sure; most people are lazy thinkers, who do not follow through on what they say, or appear to communicate to others.  They can say: "I am not a bigot," without really examining their beliefs and attitudes to see whether they are bigots.

I have to say that I'm not a Christian, though I do believe in the life and example of Jesus, as reported in the so-called New Testament.  I also believe that some of the most accurate records of the sayings of Jesus have been kept out of the N.T., because they possibly conflicted with the objectives of the secular Roman administration.  We have no idea how Jesus would view the modern Christian religion, though The Church and The Faithful have blissfully convinced themselves that Jesus would forgive them practically anything.  (He probably would, but he would beat them within an inch of their lives first.  He would cleanse the religion.)

So I have pity on these numerous evangelists.  Like sheep without a shepherd, they keep handing out these comforting words, and they feel that it is their duty to divert the natural instinct of their sheep to be charitable into giving to their own silly evangelical funds, to supposedly enlighten the heathen in various foreign lands, but actually to keep themselves in comfort.  They do not see this as anti-Christian.

Arch, fuming