There's no such things as religions...

I read an interesting article in which Richard Dawkins attacks faith schools as "child abuse" and it got me thinking about my own attitude towards religion. It must be noted that I used to dislike Dawkins for his zealous, evangelical atheism and adopted a "live-and-let-live" view towards religion but in the past few years, I have placed myself squarely in the camp of actively deriding religion and attacking it (through verbal action, of course. I wouldn't be a very good pacifist if I physically assaulted religious people!).

There were always two major problems for me: The lack of any evidence whatsoever to suggest any kind of divine existence (and the way that people say that "faith is all about believing against all odds. Sounds a lot like self-inflicted ignorance to me!) and the utter hypocrisy of religion. A good example I always use of religious hypocrisy is the story of Judas. Judas is presented as a villain for his role in the death of Christ. However, if God planned the death of Jesus all along, surely Judas should be revered as an instrument of God's will and responsible for bringing his plan to fruition? This can be set in a wider Biblical context too: The church and religious-affiliated schools always place emphasis on the idea that we humans were created with free will and that God cannot influence our thoughts and emotions. However, God is also said to be omnipotent and have a "plan" for us all. How can it fit together that we have control over our own lives yet God has already planned the route of our destinies before we were born? The idea that humans have free will from God was probably just invented to explain away why some perfectly agreeable people chose not to follow the Christian faith.

On the subject of faith schools, I have nothing positive to say about them. Having gone to Catholic school myself, it scared and confused me as a young child, learning that if we sinned we would be terribly punished yet God was supposedly benevolent? I tried desperately, in the wake of my own realisation of religion's absurdity, to cling onto the beliefs drilled into me at school right up until age 12. It was through fear that I did this. Fear that I would go to hell for not believing. Faith schools propagate terror to children.
As well as this, they actively promote ignorance if it aids their religious cause. When we learned about the creation of the world in primary school, we were taught that God made everything and that the world was "designed" by his hand. When a student said they had been told that the world was made by a "Big Bang," the teacher dismissively said "well God did that."

I guess this point of this post comes down to this. Do we want to live in a world where science, reason and tolerance are buried underneath mysticism, propaganda and ignorance in the minds of the religious? Or do we want to live in a world where the shackles are torn from their minds and we all think for ourselves?