Religion in the Future

I’m f*ck*ng scared. Everyone is scared. And I assume that if you aren’t deranged, high or religious you indeed also are scared. And funnily enough, this scaredom is something that unites humanity unlike any other. We are all frightened by mortality. Accordingly, since the beginning of Death, people have innovated new and exciting ways of coping with the only thing more real than gravity. One is the so-called “living in the moment”, where people make a pact with the demons within to not think about their eventual fate. Sometimes people make pacts with careers or wealth. It usually fills the hole until a certain tolerance is borne which eats away at the soul until a new drug is taken or the soul is taken. It is a race to die for. But the most common coping mechanism is a drug called religion. It makes us feel good inside and takes out a lot of the thinking involved in being scared of death. It doesn’t require intensive mental gymnastics to understand why this drug has been around for so long. In recent years, however, there has been a rise in atheism among Americans. 15% of Americans do not identify with a religion but for youth the statistic is a whopping 30%. This is certainly not a bad thing--being the land of the free and all--but it is not necessarily a good thing either.

Religion has been tagged to many horrifying events in history. No religion has a monopoly on religious violence but can religion really be held culprit? Slavery, which has been referred to as a black dot in American history, can teach us many things about ideology. It is well-documented that this practice had garnered the support of many churches in its time. It is also well-documented the enormous economic stake that was put into the industry of human enslavement. Not only was there a religious but also an economic ideology that sustained Slavery for so long in America. Religion is never alone in blame. Everyday when hearing of the religious extremism in the Middle East it is hard to differentiate the crazy from the religious. But when Henry David Thoreau says, “In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones”, he argues for the innate consciousness every man who thinks has. Not the same as religious morality or governmental morality there exists a morality for the just in any time period. And only then, when this morality of the man provokes thought and civil disobedience against the government, will justice be held against non-religious ideologies that wish to do harm.