Why does everyone hate religion?

"I'd go, but that's a Christian institution," said the girl behind me in honors comp, with an air of confidence and a shrug of the shoulders.

Having gone to a private Christian school for nearly six years, my selective hearing kicked in and immediately  created a response to her very general statement:

"What's wrong with Christianity?"

"Oh, nothing's wrong with it," she quickly responded, "it's just that I'd have to wake up at, like, seven in the morning for convocation, like, every other day, and we'd have this dress code, and, well... it's just not for me."

"But are those things necessarily bad?"  I pointed out.

"Well, I play sports," she pointed out, "so it wouldn't really work out well with my schedule.  And you must not play sports, since you don't understand.  Besides, I go to Wise, so who cares?"

Well, due to a painful blow to my confidence in both my faith and pride, I guess I care.

And I never even knew what institution she had deemed too Christian to join.

I had a similar experience with another girl in honors comp at lunch, who considered any form of religion as an excuse to blow off a proper education and to enable "bad" people to give themselves a conscious pardon and still say that, despite their crimes, they're going to Heaven.  Obviously, she had a liberally-influenced education, which isn't a bad thing.

I would consider myself a conservative liberal; I believe that the government should do more about big businesses and the absurdly wealthy taking advantage of the current economic situation, but I also believe in maintaining the principles that this country, and my upbringing, was founded on.

Sigmund Freud, I feel, really highlighted what I believe to be a commonly held argument for Atheism: Religion was practical in getting society started, but at this point Science and Reason should be all that governs human thinking and action.

My problem with this is that it considers religion as not only unnecessary, but even silly.  Why look at religion as something that limits human creativity and freedom when it can be looked at as something that outlines certain moral guidelines and community standards that not only keeps everyone happy, but hopeful?  And for all we human beings know, there's probably a Creator that's going to acknowledge this at some point.

You can dismiss this as childish or silly, but not as unnecessary.  Everyone, atheist or religious, needs to have a set of clear and reasonable moral guidelines.  And for those who say that science itself is a religion, bare in mind that science may answer more questions than religion, but does fit hand in hand with a variety of religious teachings.

A quick example: humans are made of a significant amount of iron, which can be found in high amounts in space dust.  Both Christianity and science generally agree on some sort of "Big Bang" at the beginning of time, but Christianity does state that the Lord made Adam from dust.  What's not to say that the Lord blew life into space dust, and that science proves it?

And Religion has been used to justify horrid mis-justice, but so can science when the topics like genetics and IQ's are called into question.

How do you perceive religion in a modern day sense, and which particular religion do you feel more strongly about than others?

Why Can't I Have Desert [First]?

Have you ever... wanted to just throw your dinner in the garbage, out the window or onto your sibling's plate, and the proceed to viscerally slamming your face down into the cake/pie/ice cream desert that you know you earned?  Even though, frankly, you know you're being both wrong and selfish?

I went to a private school for six years; two for middle school, four for high school.  Honestly, with beer flowing through the house and fists going through the walls, I was alot happier at school than at home.  School is school, though, so it sucked all the same.  Even if it costed more than most colleges do.

After graduating, I was expecting some kind of reward.  When I left for college in the fall, I got a 64gb iPod Touch, a Jawbone BIG Jambox, and a new ultrabook laptop.  That sounds really nice, doesn't it?  And believe me, it is.

Problem is, though, I had never even heard of some of those things before, much less actually desired them.

Don't get me wrong; all three of those things have fit into my regular lifestyle, and I can't imagine life without them.  But both my parents knew what I truly wanted: to bring and have all the necessary consumer electronics from my [mom's] home to my dorm room.  That includes a 32 in. television, minimum, multiple monitors and my gaming rig, as well as my Wii, my unopened PS2 and some computer parts.  

My mom said no, and my dad didn't back me up.  Why?  Because I had graduated with mostly D's and F's.

I waited for six years to be able to go to college with all my material possessions, all my symbols of security and well being, and to be with them, uninterrupted, without worry, and without parental inhibition.  I feel like Moses, who walked in the desert for forty years and his group didn't find the Promised Land until after he died.

And now I'm outraged with my father for not getting me a real gaming laptop; my mom gets two early alerts that were addressed to me, but opens them anyway just to spout off to her personal piggy bank / separated ex-husband / my father about how bad her son's doing in college.  Now, he refuses to buy me the gaming laptop that he promised me for several years.

Before someone drops a comment telling me that I'm being a brat, that my parents are doing it out of love, put yourself in my shoes for an hour.  Or a second.  Think about the frustrations, even though you and I know that I'm the one in the wrong.  Why?  Because I haven't produced the grades to earn those "special privileges."  Not yet.  

And if you're nodding your head right now, agreeing profusely that I'm in the wrong, stop it; I'm angry enough to buy some razors and a bunch of long-sleeved shirts as it is, I don't need the additional incentive to start creating dangerous body art for the sake of sympathetic attention.

So what's the point?

Well, I looked forward to desert so much that I skipped right past dinner.  Now, not only is my sweet-tooth unsatisfied, but I'm starved because I didn't eat anything.  Instead of consuming the knowledge and friends in class, doing well on quizzes and tests, and taking care of projects early, I chose to just scour the internet for what the best computers are, what things I'd really like to buy and occasionally even purchasing things for myself.

And now my life sucks.

Okay, so it's awesome.

I mean, compared to what I had in mind, it's not that awesome.  Have I earned it?  Not yet.  Have I earned the life and things that I even have now?  Not really.  In fact, I have a theory that none of has have ever even earned the right to deserve the ground that we stand on, much less the privilege to invent and use technology to create personal blogs to complain about how bad out lives are.

What do you guys think?  Am I angsty enough to be entirely in the wrong in this situation, or do I have some fair ground to stand on.  And what about you and your lives?  What examples do you have?

An Introduction [for those that read them]

To me, even something you enjoy doing can be ruined for you if assigned as homework, which is probably why I waited for as long as I could to create a blog.  A real blog; not just a throw-away McDonald's happy-meal toy attempt.

Even someone who doesn't want to work with computers, geeks and computer geeks all day long can enjoy the benefits of engineering leadership; right now, I'm aiming towards something to do with words, like writing books to make a living or to produce enough hot air to dehydrate a small town through public speaking.

I did used to want to major in computer sciences, though, until I found out what they were actually about.  Don't get me wrong, I really like using computers, but I would probably have a hard time using power computational machinery for anything other than running a video game.  And playing it.

That's probably why I always thought about creating a video game to call my own and make [alot of] money off of, until I realized that I would hate having to learn computer codes and Klingon sign languages to work with my computer or my peers.

The problem with me actually working in the fields of computer sciences and software engineering is that I probably wouldn't actually be able to fit in with the rest of the students and employees that are mastering those skill sets, which sounds weird because, well, the nerds that work this field have a hard time fitting in themselves!

Don't get me wrong; I'm actually friends with some of the aspiring computer sciences majors, while the rest have a political opinion way too different from my own for me to even be able to label them as animals with feelings and physical needs that deserve to be quenched!

Genocidal ideology aside, they're a nice group; some of them share my interest in video games and computer hardware, though they're all surprised that I'm not a computer sciences major.  Sure, I'm in a class that, really, only students that want to actually mess with the insides of a lead-laced machine and silicon-flavored codes, but it's actually a really fun class all-around.

It's mostly because I'm in a place where I feel that my natural ability to engage in conversations and manipulate them into tangents is actually appreciated; all we do is talk!  Sure, there's some note taking, but beyond that, if you like to argue left from right and right from wrong, then this is the class for you.

That and public speaking.

Which I'll also be taking.

Next semester.