Worshiping Bad Behavior

 BY THE TIME I was eight I knew I was not, and would not become religious. I didn't change fundamentally over the next fifty seven years, although I became aware of my inherent religiosity, which manifests as a reverence for existence. To me religion, all religions, seem primitive, illogical, bizarre, inadequate, entirely emotional, fear based. All religions consider themselves perfect, and refuse to change and improve, or are at least highly resistant to it. And yet, the willingness to change and to improve are universally regarded as among an individuals's greatest virtues, of great importance to being a good person. Encouraging people not to question their beliefs is the hallmark of religion, and yet we are urged to do exactly that for our own intellectual education and personal growth. Religion teaches us to disapprove of anyone whose beliefs differ from ours, to be intolerant and narrow minded, and this is not the only form of bad behavior encouraged by religion. The Christian religion in particular strongly encourages us, indeed requires us to avoid, to disavow responsibility for our own mistakes and bad behavior. Christ died for our sins.We are offered the opportunity to avoid the consequences of and responsibility for our sins. We are required to do this to be a Christian. The opportunity is presented as blackmail. The price of ridding ourselves of our responsibility is that we must worship Christ as our lord and savior in return for his paying for our sins, for his taking on the burden of our sins. If we do not accept these terms, we are condemned, doomed to horrible eternal suffering. This arrangement is imposed on us by God, even He created the circumstances in which we sin, he made it impossible for anyone to totally avoid sin and to live a perfect sin free life, and, since he is omnipotent, he has the power to simply forgive our sins without requiring that Christ be tortured to death, without requiring that we worship as our lord and savior the victim of the torturous death in order to avoid responsibility for our own actions. The only consolation to this bizarre arrangement is that is exists only within the fertile human imagination.Many ancient, primitive religions, fertility cults, believed in offering blood sacrifices to appease angry uncooperative Gods, to help agricultural production. Among them was Christianity, which was not called "Christianity" for several centuries. Human sacrifice was common. Isaac got lucky at the last moment when god, convinced of Abraham's worshipful sincerity, settled for a sheep. That any such religion widely endures in the twenty first century is remarkable, impressive, and wholly anachronistic, considering centuries of advances in human understanding of natural causation. Even more remarkable would be that any of them endure into the twenty second century.