Mike Dulak grew up Catholic in Southern California, but by his teen years, he began skipping Mass and driving straight to the shore to play guitar, watch the waves and enjoy the beauty of the morning. “And it felt more spiritual than any time I set foot in a church,” he recalled.
Nothing has changed that view in the ensuing decades.
“Most religions are there to control people and get money from them,” said Dulak, now 76, of Rocheport, Missouri. He also cited sex abuse scandals in Catholic and Southern Baptist churches. “I can’t buy into that,” he said.
Religion is fine, it’s religious people using it to abuse others that I really don’t care for.
One of my favorite quotes from Farscape. (For reference, this is a human teenager interviewing a three eyed old lady alien that’s part mystic and part crazy old lady.)
Bobby: Do religions hate each other where you come from?
Noranti: Oh, good heavens, no. Religions are grand, lofty ideas. Religious followers, now that’s another story.
Bobby: Wars.
Noranti: Unspeakable.
Bobby: So we’re not so different.
Noranti: That’s nothing to be proud of.
Religion is not fine. It is holding our entire species back.
Religion is basically just “your own hypothesis on how the world works”. People in good faith would encourage progress to see if their hypothesis is correct, not hinder it for fear of being proven wrong.
So how does coathanger abortions and murdering homosexuals factor in?
Because people took the concept of religion and used it as justification for literally everything.
Hell, religion is supposed to be what you think, the whole concept of reading a millennia-old book about unverifiable facts and going “yup, that must be all true” is extremely weird.
What you are saying is not what I have seen in parts of the world with older ancestor worship rituals going on or what I have read about the history of religion.
There isn’t some long lost golden age of grace it fell from.
I know, it’s been really bad from the start, but it’s not meant to be.
Just because you have a personal view on how the world works it doesn’t mean you have to force it down other people’s throats. You can be religious and just think “God exists, they work like this, this and that”, and act like a normal human being. It’s just that throughout history it’s been used as a tool for enforcing blanket “I know more than you, so you listen to me”.
Distinction without a difference imo.