Religion is essential to human survival as a civilized society, but both religious and anti-religious intolerance is dangerous
Copyright: Eugène Delacroix [Public domain]
Religion is a human need, as much as food or sleep. We all have to believe that there is something more to life than just our next meal or next Caribbean vacation. Different societies have produced wildly varying answers to the questions that can only be answered by religion: who are we and what are we doing in this world. One thing is clear, though; a belief system, a religion that is so exclusionary that it calls for the extermination or submission of others cannot come from God. It is, indeed, pure evil.
Today in the 21st century we are witnessing a rise in secularism, atheism, anti-Semitism, anti-Christianity, and a rise of radicalized Islam on a global scale. This isn’t a new phenomenon, but it is an extremely dangerous one. History tells us that these radical expressions of religion can lead to truly catastrophic outcomes. It is enough to recall the radicalized expression of Catholic Christianity, the Crusades, when Christians who were radicalized by Catholic Popes drunk on power burned alive entire Jewish communities and sacked the holy Christian city of Constantinople, a city that was founded by the first Christian Roman emperor and bore his name. The current era of religious upheaval is first and foremost the result of the clash between dehumanizing modernity and human nature. This clash brings out the worst in humanity and suppresses the best; it brings forth the desire to dominate and suppresses human kindness and compassion. As organized religion and its origins are no longer taught in schools, as even the highest religious authorities like the Pope and the Bishops of various Christian denominations, as well as the leading Rabbis of various Jewish congregations in the Diaspora all race to betray the foundations of Judeo-Christian religions as they are laid out in the Bible, people tend to pick up on only the worst manifestations that organized religions have given humanity, forgetting the light they have brought us over the millennia. Human nature is immutable; no matter how much progressives want to argue to the contrary, it is what it has always been, what God has made it. We humans need guidance by true shepherds, not the sellouts that so very often guide our congregations today.
Atheism and human secularism have become as dogmatic as any religion in their anti-religious fervor. They have become a religion of nihilism, of self-gratification above anything else, of inhumanity and of death. The only thing that can save humanity today is the same as it has always been: true faith, true LOVE for our creator, the ONE that made us all in His image.
