With or Without Religion

“With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”
- Steven Weinberg

I saw this great quote today. This is similar to how I've felt for most of my life. It's true that there is wisdom to be found everywhere, even in the most narrow-minded religions, but it seems that many religious people focus on dogma more than spirituality. Dogma does not apply properly in all situations. Add to this the fact that many people will use anything they can to convince people to do what they want them to do, and the fact that many religions contain a wide variety of conflicting ideas, and you quite often end up with evil people convincing good people to do evil things "because God commands it," or for similar made-up reasons.

The good people of the world are simply trying to do what they think will be truly beneficial for everyone. The evil people usually only care about themselves and their close friends and family, ie their own interests, or the destruction of things they hate. They often purposely mislead good people in order to convince them to do evil. Religion certainly has its good points, but this is one of its greatest weaknesses. There are a great number of evil people misusing its power.

Of course, by evil people, I mean people willing to do evil repeatedly in order to get what they want. Usually, the evil people who misuse religion think they are good people. Quite often, the greatest damage they do is to themselves, wielding the power of religion to convince themselves that some dark desire they have is the correct thing to do, rather than actually thinking it out and realizing that it would do more harm than good. Then they sometimes aggressively go around poisoning their family, friends, and anyone else they can convince to listen to them, with the same corrupted religious ideas that are eating away at their own souls.

The good people of the world truly want to do good. We've been allowing the religious dogmatists to mislead and control good people for far too long. Thankfully, we're finally gaining the upper hand in the modern age. Religion is losing its iron grip, and true spirituality is gaining a firmer foothold every day. More and more people are opening up to the idea that wisdom exists in all religions and ways of thinking, and seeking true enlightenment wherever it can be found.

On a similar note:
“Wisdom has never made a bigot, but learning has.”
- Josh Billings

Be careful that what you learn and teach helps to expand and free minds. Anything else is just knowledge.
- Jay Miller