Non-issue feature: Religion

This week we discussed issues that should be non-issues. Religion is one of them.

By Jared Vaillancourt [Creative Writing Bureau Chief]

Praise (deity’s name here)!

Did that offend you? Then you need to lighten up. Seriously. Religion is something that is integral to every single human being on the planet, even those who claim to reject religious practices and faiths.

Do you know why? This is because religion is simply about believing in something, which everyone invariably does, especially the belief in nothing, naysayers.

Let me be perfectly clear here: I’m not bashing anyone’s religion. We all know that religion is a tool, a construct of the collective human mind to create a sense of comfort through faith in the belief that thing we don’t understand can have benevolent machinations we can’t see working behind the scenes. Most religions were started thousands of years ago when people didn’t understand much about anything, so those of you thinking that science is a crock, well, that’s another non-issue altogether. Let me say that science and religion can go hand in hand if you have a rational, logical and open mind, unlike the naysayers.

But I digress.

Everyone believes in something. Everyone is unique. Even if you’re a member of a full-fledged religious movement like Christianity or Islam, your beliefs will be your own interpretations of the teachings presented to you by your teachers. This automatically (according to the strictest of faiths) makes us all heretics to each other. Relax – a heretic is simply someone who doesn’t believe the exact same thing you believe. Geez. That poor word has been given so much negative attention.

But once again, I digress. Religion shouldn’t be an issue. Its ultimate purpose is to provide a moral framework that will give you comfort and reason to help guide you through a turbulent world and to take solace in the fact that you won’t understand everything (case in point: try watching a few episodes of Star Trek. I like the show and I don’t know what they’re blabbering about). It’s nothing to argue about, and it certainly isn’t worth fighting and dying over. Those people who do that are just unreasonable.

Praise (Insert Deity here – it’s all relative).