"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?
