I left Church 10 years ago as the convention of little question marks in my head finally grew too overwhelming: “How does praying help me? I really don’t get how those (sometimes very weird) citations from old books that I hear during Mass relate to my life. Why does god command women to obey men? If god is loving, why do people have to suffer? Why are there wars people call Holy? Original sin? wtf” and so on.
Also in my mind values like respect, tolerance and compassion are not, and have never been, tied to religion. Why on earth would I want to hurt other beings, or make them miserable? I really don’t need religion to tell me that being a good person is, well, better.
Nowadays I want to be able to put these thoughts and feelings that made me leave religion into more concrete terms, as the concept ‘separation of religion and state’ is questioned again and again by politic absurdities ranging from “Abendland in Christenhand” to religiously motivated suicide assassinations.
I feel the urge to be able to express my point of view more clearly because: sticking head in sand, after decades and centuries of getting rid of indoctrination and learning to think freely and critically (often a painful process, just ask Giordano Bruno’s ashes) – not going to happen, and I will try to contribute as much as I can.
So I start with looking at (a slide found at answersingenesis.org), which has later been removed. It featured a 5 year old named Joey who was described as already knowing about evolution, the Big Bang and the old age of the earth. Next to Joey were images of Joey’s “teachers”, namely Bob the Builder and Ernie and Bert, among others, to mock secular education (well, my teachers were neither furry nor fictional. YMMV.)
Last on the slide there was a concerned question: what “teachers” are your children listening to?
I made a follow-up slide to answer that:
(Max Planck, Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, to name just a few)
Next question please.