cappuccinogirl

Okay, I'm going to do my very best not to go on a Grace-sized rant about religion. I really am....

I attended an international Christian school until the tenth grade because I had already started school in Britain when I was five and my parents did not want to put me back into Kindergarten for a year when we moved countries. The majority of the parents who sent their children to this school were missionaries. I was one of very few children who had parents not involved in missions. The school was good. I'm not going to knock it for even a moment, but it has made me far more aware of the Christian religion than many Brits of my age. There's this attitude of 'we are right and everyone else is going to hell'. There's also extreme blinkardness and constant contradiction. Love your neighbor as yourself but never date someone who isn't a Christian. One teacher even said that Catholics weren't Christians. It's as though things are stuck in this giant time warp where the values held 2,000 years ago are still appropriate in this modern age.

Now I'm in my twenties and I am an atheist. For a while, when I was young, I believed in the concept of God and Jesus dying for my sins. I also believed in Christkind (the german equivalent of Santa Claus) and that various horrible things might attack me if I left my foot dangling out from under the covers while I slept.

It always strikes me as ironic that some of the same people who believe in things that contradict all rational thinking continue to cause such hatred and hurt to their fellow human beings. A part of me wants to believe that the dreamers strive for mutual understanding, but history has shown us time and time again that this is not the case. I do not agree with banning religion as occured in the USSR and other communist nations. It is a fundamental part of freedom of expression. The problem arrises when a relgion becomes an ideology which must be imposed, when people are discriminated against and religion is used as its basis. Mix such attitudes with politics and you're left with soft-fashism. We could all do without this, I am sure.

Don't get me wrong. I don't hate religion at all, so long as those practicing it accept that it is a life-choice, that they can accept that others chose not to and are contented in doing so. I associate religion with innocence, with childhood and this ability to believe in anything, when we listened wide eyed, enthralled by everything around us as we discovered the world. In every continent across the globe, before man even invented the concept of nations, there has been this need to explain why we are here and how we are supposed to live. We all possess this inherent need to know, to explain it all, to reach a feeling of self- actualisation and fulfillment. It's what makes us human. And so, in every part of the world we find religion. No religion is unique. Its intent is to help man find a purpose, to explain the impossible with cookie-cutter explanations. These days, with all that we know, with all that goes on around us, if somebody can still believe in a higher spiritual being or beings, and, even more incredible, the majority of a holy text written centuries ago, then it says so very much about them. They've remained young at heart somehow, because they can still see fairy dust where I see flour.