Generally speaking, I’m a live and let live kind of person. You believe what you want and I’ll believe what I want, we can engage in a civil discussion about it if you’d like, but that’s your choice. Here’s a warning, if you’re a religious person and you’re easily offended, don’t read this entry. Stop. Do not pass Go. Here’s something more soothing to read.

OK, you’re still reading. Then I take that as an invitation to depart from my live and let live stance to say that I’m coming to believe strongly that organized religion is one of the most evil influences at work in our society today; even factoring in all the good works that do come from religious individuals around care for the elderly, feeding the hungry, etc.

What is prompting this? I read two articles today that set my blood boiling (as just the latest examples TODAY of religion’s negative influence on society.) Item #1: A 14-year old boy refuses medical treatment for leukemia on the basis of religious objections to medical intervention. He died today. There is no reason for a person to refuse treatment on a religious basis – it’s tantamount to saying “Santa will leave me coal in my stocking if I was bad this year.” If this child didn’t want the treatment and preferred to die due to some rational reason (bad prognosis, substantially decreased quality of life post-treatment,) it would still be difficult to take, but it would at least be understandable. That people are making life and death decisions on pure bunk is outrageous and criminal.

Item #2: The Pope says atheism is responsible for “greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice.” Last time I checked, there wasn’t an atheist cult demanding 10% of people’s income, threatening believers with eternal damnation for non-compliance with their interpretation of a contradictory set of rules set down by a compiled work of fiction, conscripting uneducated children to blow themselves and others up to gain entry to paradise, or ritually sexually abusing children due to their position of trust and power in the cult. I say this to you Pope Benedict-Arnold, “let he without sin cast the first stone.”

Just one day, Today, there are two stories demonstrating the evil and hypocrisy of religion. Tomorrow will bring more. Is it any wonder that thinking people, people who are responsible for their own actions, people who can tell the difference between good/evil, right/wrong, true/false are leaving organized religion in droves? There are spiritual aspects to life, but they don’t have to be, and really shouldn’t be regulated by these entities forcing Dennis Lindberg to make Custer decisions around his own life. It’s ludicrous.

I know a number of very decent, kind hearted, intelligent people who act responsibly though they participate in religion. Independently, I like and respect these people. I strongly suspect that these same people would be decent, kind hearted, generous, and responsible even in the absence of religion – though I don’t know if they know that.

In the aggregate, religion has got to go and go fast. It’s a cancer eating away at the core of our society cloaked in the word of “god.” It might be time for a holy war, the war to diminish the religious impact on society. To start, since Churches are, at heart, businesses, their tax deduction should be repealed immediately. I’m going to write my representatives about that… My tolerance for living in a society where hypocrisy is ingrained in society through religious cults is at an end.

I wish I had written this material on why I’m angry about religion, but thankfully, Greta Christina already wrote it and I can just link to it. It does a much more thorough and articulate job of communicating the outrage that is collecting around religion and “god.”