I have a feeling this will be quite a long post so I'm preparing myself for it not being read in its entirety by anyone. But that's okay. I just need to get my thoughts out.
Although I've recently felt incredibly creatively stifled (I've been unable to draw, write or photograph lately, for some reason), that doesn't mean that I'm not thinking about things. I'm always thinking about things, which makes it really frustrating when I can't get it out of me cretaively and it gets stuck in my head. The only thing I feel capable o doing today is writing, hence what will be this long post. (See; I'm rambling already).
Religion. Where do I start on the subject of religion? I recently came over someone on YouiTube who calls himself "The amazing atheist" (love the sarcasm) on YouTube and one of his clips addressed the subject of morality. He said something in it that perfectly captures the essence of why I believe religion exists:
"When you say "let's have a rule against killing" because then you have a less chance of getting killed, that means that everyone who has the desire to kill, for whatever reason (fun, profit, vengeance, whatever), society is basically asking those people to obstain from those behaviours for the good of society. The lady in front of you at the postal office who wants to pay for one stamp with her credit card; you do want to bash her in the head repeatedly. You might not do it, even if you could, but you still kinda want to. Everyone has little violent urges here and there. And as a society where we're less compelled to regulate those urges, we become blood thirsty monsters. Fine. And then of course there's theft, because of course there ARE things we want to steal. We don't follow that commandment that says "thou shalt not envy thy neighbour's goods and his ass and his wife"; we want all of that, we WANT his goods, we want his ox, we want his wife; give those things to us. If we didn't have a desire to kill and to steal there wouldn't have to be rules against killing and stealing.
My point is that all of these things; anger, sexuality, envy, violence, whatever, are in human nature. They are. While religion tries to supress these urges in order to control the masses, other beliefs (such as satanism, for example) tells us to embrace them. I'm not a Satanist, although there are several core points in it that I believe in, but looking at organized religion it feels so obviously and completely doomed to fail to try and take these things out of a human. They're there for a reason. We're not all just good and well-meaning and meek; it would be unnatural. It's a natural reaction to, if someone treats us badly, want to retaliate. It's part of our survuval instinct. To call that pert of us as individuals morally despicable and wrong, and to try to get us to go against them with the argument that if we don't we'll be eternally doomed...talk about grabbing people by the balls! It's not surprising it keeps people in check. Because let's face it: if you have never wanted to hurt someone just because they hurt you (be that physically or otherwise), if you have never wanted what someone else has, if you have never wished for someone else to be worse off than you, if you have never felt a need to quench a hunger for something (sex, violence, destruction)...you are not human. These urges are as natural as the urges to eat, sleep and reproduce. They're so basic that they cannot (and should not) be taken out of us, and any attempts in doing so will, without exception, fail.
(To watch the full "What is morality?" clip from The Amazing Atheist, click below).
