My views on religion

Warning: Don't be offended. Don't read this if you think you might be offended and "disfriend" me.

Mysterious is the first word that comes into my head. I don't understand how and why people believe in someone up there. Is religion a type of superstition? People who claim that their prayers are heard, could those be just coincidences? The few countable times that I went to church, I went there skeptical, hence I didn't feel the spiritual elevation/ relief that people claim to have found. I find it extremely strange why people go to church every week, listen to the same person on the stage talking mainly about the same book for a few hours.. Maybe you really have to truly believe in a higher being before those activities become meaningful.

It's easy to get kids to believe. When I was a kid, I used to think that if you give up your chance of being a prince and sit under a Bodhi tree, you'll be enlightened. But there are quite a few such trees in my school and I never saw anyone sitting under them. And then if you examine the story again, all the prince did was to be sick of birth, age, illness, death.. Well, who isn't? Why is it that no one else has become Buddhas?

Some people say that religion ensures that everyone has morals and won't start killing each other. After thousands of years of human evolution, are we so immature that we need to fear punishment by someone more powerful than us to not commit crimes? Can't we keep ourselves in check? And obvious questions will be why should the Gods have the power to punish, why shouldn't we? Why can they be perfect and not us? In Christianity, why put a snake in the garden in the first place and make us all suffer? And what right do they have to punish people who don't believe in them? I believe I ought to have the freedom of belief, it's a basic human right, isn't it?Are the gods sadistic?

And then there's the question of what if everything's really true? What if there's really someone up there who can hear and understand everyone's every thought in every language? Will the someone be angry to see my blog entry? Will I be struck by lightning when I'm going home?

Steve said that religion helps u through parts of life. Is that the function of religion? I don't think religious people will agree to that. I think the only real function of religious gatherings, as it seems to me, is that you get to socialise with people who have the same belief that you have. Because of this same belief thing, everyone will be friendly to each other. So you'll get the support of a lot of friends. My conclusion about how religion works is that religion gives you friends, and it's the friends that do all the wonders.

All right, that's all. This whole thing started because Stephen has just decided to go to church with his girlfriend, and he's been talking about it with everyone, and with Stephen, everyone is really everyone and that's how I realise that there are so many church-going people around. OK, enough blogging, I've been blogging for nearly an hour now, and my supervisor has still not appeared. Guess he wouldn't get his transformed bacteria tmr either.