This is posted in the DIR forum of Secular Beliefs, under Atheism 2. So don't come here flaming me for saying what I'm about to say because it doesn't coincide with your religious beliefs. Leave your faith at the door, please.
I would like to throw a proposition out here for you all to comment on. This is not about my beliefs, and the proposition is posed in the theme of Atheism, so please try to not discuss the relevance of Atheism.
Now, I am a firm disbeliever, an anti-theist. I don't believe in 'God' and would find it most uncomfortable if there was a God, or if I would be lead to believe there was one. This is all inspired by what the mainstream believers fling my way, which are predominantly Christians or Muslims. Most religion I see is Abrahamic, I come across other religions, but they almost seem to misfit the definition I have established of 'religion'. I can't know God is real, because there is no evidence for it, and because the most popular image of God, is incompatible with all that I do hold to be true - among which logic and common scientific facts.
But, my anti-theism comes from the image of God that is not directly painted by its believers, but by the results of their actions. I'm a softy, I care a lot for other people and it seems to hurt me more to see others in pain, than it would if I were the one suffering. Such 'results' of religious inspired action, are what I hate about religion. And I think "hate" is the perfect word for it, because nothing in this world that is under our control, has made an excuse for more suffering, than religion has. I hate it, because we control it, but have done nothing for so long to stop its vices. I, like most of the civilized world, have witnessed the agony laid upon homosexual men (and women), their persecutions, their suicides and their murders. There are millions of people who suffer as a scapegoat of religious mobs, worldwide. Women who are handled in a most gruesome manner, circumcised, beaten, raped, stoned, exploited, sold; all because there is an excuse for it to be found in (a) religion. Children neglected, abused, killed or cast away. Animals abused or slaughtered for spiritual means. Buildings flown into because of a religious disagreement. Millions - if not billions - slaughtered, for upholding a different delusion than others. Countries overrun for a 'Holy' purpose. Not to mention how religion keeps most of this world in its grasp, preventing many people from realizing that we're in this thing [read: life on earth] together and ought to make the best of it - for everyone.
It is no doubt that religion has created a very grim name for itself. But still, it persists, in the face of all we humans claim to be. Intellectuals. Yet it is still here. It so appears some people are fond of it. Even people who don't believe in it, tend to want to protect it. Some seem to need some reassurance, a veil that will hide the harsh truths of this world. Regardless of the exact reasons why it is still here, I would like to pose the following:
If it were at hand to create a new religion that everyone in apparent need of such would suddenly succumb to, would it be possible to make (it) a religion that would not be objectionable?
It would have to be a religion which doesn't claim to know the absolute truth, which doesn't force itself unto others, which doesn't persecute anyone, which doesn't belittle mankind's potential in progression, which doesn't hang young homosexual boys and which somehow still keeps people comfortably numb - the actual purpose of this psychological placebo. So a religion that still 'works', but which doesn't have any negatives.
