Some thoughts on religion

‘Most people think, 
Great god will come from the skies, 
Take away everything 
And make everybody feel high. 
But if you know what life is worth, 
You will look for yours on earth’    Peter Tosh & Bob Marley 
Intro
I always liked this verse from ‘Get Up, Stand Up’ - it makes me think of something said by my cynical old English teacher, Mr Jones; Humans, he said, made up beliefs in life-after-death because they just couldn’t face the fact that when they die, that’s it. And is it seems to me that all religions are based on the hope of something better after death some people forget to live in the here and now. Live and let live that is.
My Personal Experience of Religion 
I was not raised to be religious. I wasn’t baptised, didn’t go to church and my mum told me the only reason my parents wed in a church was because my gran insisted and back in the 1950s only divorced people got married in register offices. This is not to say that I had no exposure to religion or that when I was young I didn’t believe in God. At primary school we had religious assemblies along Church of England Christian lines. That is we sang hymns such as ‘We plough the fields and scatter’, ‘All things bright and beautiful’, ‘To be a pilgrim’, ‘For those in peril on the sea’ etc. and we said the Lord’s Prayer. We were told child-friendly versions of Biblical stories – Moses, Noah, Joseph and Daniel from the Old Testament and of course Jesus’ birth from the New. I pretty much just assumed there was a God – A Protestant Christian God.
Cynical Years
I’m not sure at what age I stopped believing there was a god but by the time I moved to secondary school I had decided I could not believe in something no one could prove existed.  I was given a King James’ Bible at this time and started reading bits of it in that typically cynical teenage way, looking for inconsistencies and contradictions, of which there are very many. Religion, organised religion, to me was all about control and I was scornful of it and those who professed to be religious, with their hypocrisies and unquestioning belief. In particular I would quote bits of the Bible back at people. My favourite being Genesis 11:1-9 (Babel )– where God, seemingly fearful of what humans could achieve, confused our language and scattered us across the Earth. What did that say about this God and his attitude towards his creation?
Why do people believe?
As I have gotten older my attitude towards belief has changed even if my feelings about organised religion have not. I can understand why some people would believe in god(s). Just look around – from the simple beauty of a flower to the vastness of the universe as seen through telescopes to our own abilities to create and invent, to be brave and compassionate, the wonder of our existence could make anyone believe that some divine power is behind it all. But then nature can be cruel; floods, droughts, earthquakes can destroy and kill; humans are capable of unspeakable cruelty, inflicting suffering and violence upon each other. Even so I imagine people with faith in their god(s) must take comfort in the belief that all these things are in the ‘plan’ and will be explained in the next life. I understand then why some people believe. It’s what they do in the name of these beliefs that cause all the problems.
Killing in the name of
I know that for some people killing, cruelty and the oppression of their fellow human beings is not driven by religion. I know that when it is observed how many people have been killed and oppressed in the name of one religion or another, others will counter with the examples of Hitler’s Nazi Germany, Stalin’s USSR or Mao’s China as atheistic states that killed, imprisoned, tortured and used terror on the people not in the name of god but ideology. This misses the point. These tyrants developed the cult of personality to the point that they replaced god(s) but more than that their regimes prove the dangerous and destructive power of belief, of faith even, to make some people blind to what is being done in the name of such beliefs. Throughout history leaders, religious and political, have used belief to control, to keep control and to blame the ‘unbelievers’ for everything that is wrong. Sometimes this control is subtle, sometimes it is blatant and oppressive but it is always divisive.
Conclusion
The divisions created by fanatical belief keep us apart and prevent us from achieving our potential, which should be limitless.