I think religion gets a bad rap, but it’s not inherently flawed or evil. It certainlycan be.  I think people can be bad sometimes (or all the time), and religion can be used as an enabling crutch or as a tool to manifest ulterior motives.  

But with all the darkness that people have proliferated in the name of religion, there are also immeasurable fruits that have affected the world for the better.  Religion can unite people, draw community, breathe love, provide structure, and instill a moral path for human beings.  

All religions are not equal, they don’t all come from the same place, nor are their intentions alike.  You must understand the difference. I spent almost a decade of my life studying religion, from attending Hare Krishna services at temples with a Bhagavad Gita, to poring over the Dalai Lama’s teachings, to reading the Book of Mormon and the Koran from cover to cover.  Faith and religion are infinitely complex and serious living matter.  

The popular thing to do is to dismiss religion, to break it down, bash it for it’s ignorance and lack of intelligence.  To hate on God or the Church  and the “idiots” who blindly subscribe to religion is easy because it makes the critics feel empowered, wiser, and self-righteous in their ideology.  But the lambasting of religion can, in itself, be its own religion!  It’s like those who call out Christianity as narrowminded because it declares itself as the only truth.  The hypocrisy being that  such a sentiment is also, in and of itself, a truth, and equally narrowminded.

The point being here, that religion, faith, a meditative state, a daily walk with God - however you want to define it - does not necessarily have to be as basic as a bunch of lost, uneducated followers trying to make themselves feel better with storybook fables of right vs. wrong.  Maybe there is something beyond the metaphysical.  Just because you don’t believe in something doesn’t mean it’s not true.  There is a reason why some of these faiths have lasted for thousands of years and have only grown stronger with time.  

If you choose to believe in something, know why you do. Or at the very least strive to understand the reasoning behind it.  If you choose to refrain from a belief, the burden is the same. Know why you don’t believe it.