By Kevin B

Image by doug88888 via Flickr

It has been of my assertion ever since I broke free of childhood that religion quite simply does not make sense. It completely blows my mind to see intelligent people say they believe in Jesus and that they know that God exists. It makes me think to myself, humans as smart as we are, may not have the mental capacity to fully understand exactly what is going on. We have invented great things and advanced a long way but the basis of our intelligence may just be far too low to comprehend exactly how the universe and our world came to be.

We see this on earth, where a species can get to a level of comprehension of something but fail to fully understand. If you teach a chimpanzee to sign, does it really fully understand the language? Is it possible that we could one day teach that chimpanzee to talk and function in our world? The answer is no, and it is because the chimps brain is just not at a level to fully be on par with our own. I think this is where religion comes into play for humans. There are certain things about our physical world that are so far beyond us that we resort to religion so that we feel we understand.

Have you ever looked out into space and then looked at the ground you’re standing on and felt so incredibly small? We are smaller than a single bacterium on a grain of sand on a world sized beach. It seems however some of our bacteria believe they have solved our universe (based on nothing), and that the one Jesus bacteria is the answer.

I have come to peace with the fact that we may never know all the answers, but that to me is no reason to make them up. If we wish to be a species that survives and if we wish to be happy we need to give up on our archaic belief systems. They are no longer relevant and are only holding us back.

Science continues to give us more and more information about our universe, and hopefully one day we will gain a much better understanding of it. But in the mean time, while we are still waiting on those answers we need to focus on what we have already learned. We exist, we evolved, and we are now knowledgeable enough to overcome our tribal superstitions. It destroys families, kills friends, and cripples our ability to enjoy the very small amount of time we have to enjoy this planet.

Everyone, it is time for the next step in our evolution. It is time to break free, and be confident enough in ourselves that we no longer need a god to govern our society. We are a rational and emotional being, and we can function ethically without the threat of eternal damnation. As long as religion divides us, we will never all get along and never fully understand ourselves.

.....Let’s all grow up.