Reasons Not to
Have Religion
If you have the awareness level of a snail, and your thinking is
mired in shame and guilt (with perhaps a twist of drug abuse or
suicidal thinking), then subscribing to a religion can help you
climb to a higher level of awareness. Your mindset, however, still
remains incredibly dysfunctional; you’ve merely swapped one form of
erroneous thinking for another.
For reasonably intelligent people who aren’t suffering from
major issues with low self-esteem, religion is ridiculously
consciousness-lowering. While some religious beliefs can be
empowering, on the whole the decision to formally participate in a
religion will merely burden your mind with a hefty load of false
notions.
When you subscribe to a religion, you substitute nebulous
group-think for focused, independent thought. Instead of learning
to discern truth on your own, you’re told what to believe. This
doesn’t accelerate your spiritual growth; on the contrary it puts
the brakes on your continued conscious development. Religion is the
off-switch of the human mind.
Leave the mythology behind, and learn to think for yourself.
Your intellect is a better instrument of spiritual growth than any
religious teachings.
One of the worst mistakes you can make in life is to attach your
identity to any particular religion or philosophy, such as by
saying “I am a Christian” or “I am a Buddhist.” This forces your
mind into a fixed perspective, robbing you of spiritual depth
perception and savagely curtailing your ability to perceive reality
accurately. If that sounds like a good idea to you, you’ll probably
want to gouge out one of your eyeballs too. Surely you’ll be better
off with a single, fixed perspective instead of having to consider
two separate image streams… unless of course you’ve become attached
to stereo vision.
Religious “truths” are inherently rooted in a fixed perspective,
but real truth is perspective-independent. When you substitute
religious teachings for truth, you mistake shadows for light
sources. Consequently, you doom yourself to stumble around in the
dark, utterly confused. Clarity remains forever elusive, and the
best answer you get is that life is one giant mystery. Religious
mysteries, however, arise not from what is truly unknowable; they
arise from the limitations of trying to understand reality from a
fixed frame of reference.
A more intelligent approach is to consider reality through a
variety of different perspectives without trying to force your
perceptions into an artificial religious framework.