Do you practice religion?

What a potentially divisive prompt.

I have no intention of causing confusion or making anyone feel attacked for/doubt in their personal beliefs. They are yours, and these are mine.

That being said, to answer the prompt directly, do I PRACTICE religion? No. Practicing religion often requires active participation in a church and regularly reading the Bible and trying to live by the lessons written inside. I do neither of those things. If that’s all the information you care about, stop reading here. If you’re interested in reading more about how I see the world, read on at the risk of being upset.

The reason I do not practice can be boiled down to some simple sentiments, but this may require lots of explanation.

There’s nothing wrong with believing in something greater than yourself, something that is beyond you and your control. What IS wrong is accountability and blame in the world. This part is attributable to human leadership as much as spiritual beings of a higher nature. You cannot claim that someone’s vision is the reason that good things happen and reward them for it while also denying that anything wrong that happens is also their fault.

We also cannot sit on our hands, so to speak, and hope/wish/pray/gossip about something trying to get a better outcome without actively doing something to participate in the achievement of that outcome when there has been thousands of years of evidence that actions speak louder than words. However, the issue here isn’t just about “talking about something instead of doing something” and more about recognizing the fact that “talking about something IS doing something, but was talking really all that productive?” (Regardless of which branch of faith you prescribe to, if you say you are “the hands of God” then actually BE those hands doing something and not just acting like a mouth piece. That’s someone else’s job.)

I’ve more or less baked this all into my personal belief of “Do unto others as you would have done unto you” which I’ve talked about before. I would like to add more on top of that post as it relates to today’s prompt, as well as more detail to why I mentioned not going to church. I don’t like the idea that people can go to church one day a week for maybe an hour or two, pretending to be good and pious/devout individuals, and then go out into the world and be hateful, spiteful, greedy assholes. That’s not how it works. Unless I’m mistaken, attending church is not a free pass to sin the rest of the time.

We cannot claim to be good people while continuing to treat others with disdain and hate. No amount of fake piety makes up for the continued prejudice we have in the world today.

We cannot reward decision makers for their successes while turning a blind eye/assigning blame elsewhere for their failures. Accountability needs to be upheld at all levels, no matter how painful it may seem, because that’s the only way we can learn to be better than who we were yesterday.

Do unto others as you would have done unto you.