Religion: The Root of Evil and Suffering?

Exploring the role of religion in the cosmic human experience.

Photo from Christian Research Institute

Religion. Do we need it? Can we live without it? Does it have a positive impact on this world? Are religious people typically more loving, honest, compassionate, or charitable? Or…might religion, with all its certainties, reassurances, pious aspirations, and even glorious promises, be the greatest lie ever told? Most Christians try to deny that Christianity is a religion. “It’s a relationship,” they tell you. However, it’s rallied around an organized institution and a creed, therefore it’s a religion.

Back in my former Christian days, I used to think that my religion was unquestionably a good thing. Christianity tells you that God loves the world, and you should too. It sends untold numbers of missionaries into the world to try to save sinners from going to hell “before it’s too late.” Many churches—and those in them—are indeed very charitable in their local communities and the world at large.

But could religion, in any form, merely be a nice fluffy sheep suit disguising a ravenous, blood-thirsty Wolf? Today we explore this question.

I have found throughout my life that being a Christian does not inherently make one more loving, honest, or charitable (just like being atheist does not inherently indicate one is counter to those things). Each church and each person within its walls must be judged on their own merit. But today we are looking at religion cosmically, or zoomed out. This is not meant to discredit fellowships and people that are truly an example of the love of the real Jesus and the universality of the real God (and all the loving, sacrificial prophets and icons of other religions)—they do exist.

This blog entry examines a generalization of the impact of religion on humanity.

Let me start by sharing my experience as a microcosm of the macrocosm. I grew up in the Nazarene Church. My mom took us dragged us kids there every Sunday and Wednesday throughout my childhood, whenever the doors were open. I can still visualize the old church, small town American style. There was a vaulted sanctuary filled with pews and a stage upstairs, and a few small Sunday school rooms with a larger fellowship room down in a basement, all made of the same popcorn textured semi-gloss white painted walls. Every classroom had flannel graph boards, and on Sunday mornings, someone played an accordion while we sang “Jesus Loves Me This I know, for the Bible tells me so…” and “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world…” among other songs.

Even as a barely conscious pre-kindergartener, I remember not liking this thing called church, and not feeling like it resonated with my child soul. I didn’t like the condescending, stern teachers, the obligatory ways we had to sing boring, repetitious songs at the start of Sunday school, and especially the always present sour odor in our classrooms that smelled like a mix of old plaster, musty carpet, and stale air. But at that age, you don’t have choices, so you consent to these experiences by coercion. You also don’t know what the alternatives would be, so this is just life and maybe everyone’s life is like this.

Sermons took forever—usually a solid hour of listening to a grim, scowling Pastor rifling through Bible passages and notes after fifteen minutes of prayer and excruciating old hymns. I remember a lot of hell and brimstone being shouted from the pulpit every Sunday. Even as a four-year-old, I was already well indoctrinated and terrified of hell. The message was reinforced nearly every Sunday: keep short accounts with God or you will be left behind.

In the Nazarene Church, there was no secure salvation. Any unconfessed or unrepented sins still on your record “when Jesus came back in the clouds to rapture away his faithful” would leave you behind on earth for seven years of tribulation. The tribulation consisted of 3.5 years of peaceful rule under the control of the anti-Christ, but if you did not swear allegiance to this nefarious figurehead, you would eventually be beheaded. The choice was: obey God faithfully and go to heaven with the help of the guillotine (my Pastor used to joke that you wanted to be first in line for the guillotine, before the blades got dull), or live in relative peace serving the anti-Christ until you were sentenced to hell in the final Judgment for rejecting God.

Sheesh, who comes up with this stuff?! Psychopaths?

Needless to say, I went to sleep every night as a child, trying to remember all my sins of the day, lest I be “left behind” if the “thief in the night” were to come, a reference to a Scripture passage that was often reinforced.

I went to Nazarene summer camp for a week every year from the time I was eight until high school. Our middle school age church camp was a five-hour drive from my hometown in Wyoming to the Big Timber Mountains in Montana. As I got older, it was a great way to meet new friends and especially my favorite past time: meeting interesting boys from all over Montana. The main thing I remember from church camp (besides the spectacular northern lights we got to see one year) was that every year, the camp staff projected the terrifying movie, “A Thief in the Night” up on a huge movie screen and then had a long, drawn out alter call for all of those heathen middle schoolers to get right with Jesus before it was too late. This movie should have been banned for psychological abuse. It traumatized me.

Thank my lucky stars that my mom and I stopped going to the Nazarene Church by the time I was in high school and started attending an Evangelical Free Church together after my siblings had left home. Leaving the Nazarene Church was the best thing that ever happened to me. It started a long journey of single steps through more moderate churches that rarely talked about hell, providing me with opportunities to start healing my perceptions of the character of God. Those steps eventually led me to deconstructing hell and religion altogether in my early 40s.

I think the allure of religion is understandable. As children, we need to develop a strong container (ego) or way of processing and integrating in the world that gives us identity, structure, certainty, a sense of morals and ethics, and a belief in something greater than ourselves. As adults, we prize the safety and security of nurturing and maintaining that well-developed identity in a setting where we don’t have to work for our own answers to existential questions—answers are being handed to us as neatly packaged belief systems according to our religion’s particular creed, holy book, and interpretations of that book.

In religion, we find tight-knit community rallied around an agreed upon ideology or worldview. We find hope, connection, purpose, and meaning. But at what cost? Do these benefits of having a middleman or gatekeeper between ourselves and God always have a dark side?

In his book Falling Upward: Spirituality for Two Halves of Life, Franciscan Priest Richard Rohr said something like, “religion is a good place to start life and a terrible place to end it.” What could a Catholic priest possibly mean by that? Perhaps as many as 6 billion out of the 8 billion people in the world would say we can’t exist without religion—at least, not without the “right” religion (theirs). I used to be one of those people.

The etymology of religion from Latin means to bind, obligation, or bond. Think bondage. It is a means of reinforcing your separateness from God and others as a result of your lowly, subservient, sinful, pathetic state. It declares that you need a religious hierarchy between your hopelessly lost self and the almighty Perfect One who can save you from eternal loss.

It's apparent to me that religion was created in ages past as a PSYOP, or a psychological operation. The definition of a PSYOP is: a planned operation that conveys selected information to a target audience to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately, their behavior. The purpose of all PSYOPs are to create the emotions, attitudes, or desired behavior that supports the achievement of the operation planner’s mission.

What is the mission of religion?

There is a major common thread in all organized or institutional religion. It teaches you to look for “God” outside of yourself. God, religion tells you, is a separate, distinct entity that you must revere, worship, appease, and obey (usually in very specific ways) or else. This one Great Delusion leads to expected fruits: dogma, disempowerment, fear, judgmentalism, hypocrisy, and separation consciousness (us vs. them, Thou vs. I). And of course, these “fruits” lead to a plethora of injustices, violence, trauma, mental illness, isolation, depression, broken families and relationships, etc.

Give pause for a moment to consider. Religion teaches you to distrust your own heart and intuition because it is desperately wicked and deceitful. Instead, they say, you must trust someone else’s heart and intuition—that of your priest, your pastor, your elder (which typically all happen to be men), and the scholars and translators of your modern day English Bible with it’s 10 commandments and threats of eternal loss and punishment. You must trust these sources to guide you in all decisions, because you can’t trust yourself.

Why is the heart and perceptions of truth by someone else considered trustworthy in guiding your life and spiritual path, yet your own is not? Do you see how ludicrous is such a teaching?

Jesus said, “You will know them by their fruits.” You know, Jesus…the one who came here to tear down the white-washed tombs of oppressive, hate-inducing religious hierarchies and ideologies? Such a simple, clear measuring stick…unless you are trying to discern it amongst your own clan! The same Jesus also said, “the Spirit will teach you all things” and “the Spirit will guide you into all truth” (John 14:26, 16:13). He never mentioned your pastor, priest, elder, or even your Bible.

But, if you did choose to adhere to the Bible, you could sum up its entirety with one teaching or principle, according to Jesus. It is this:

Love God and love people. All the Scriptures, according to Jesus, are founded on these two mandates (see Matt. 22:37-40). In fact, this simple command is repeated at least four times in the New Testament. Despite how it got slanted and changed over time, the Bible is not a moral handbook or a justification for judging and condemning people. It’s a book about treating others as you would want to be treated—being a worker of love and justice in the world. Full stop. Yet is this what we see in the fruits of Christianity within the world?

I came to notice a few untenable characteristics of Christianity, this major world religion that makes up about one-third of the entire world population. Aside from reinforcing our separateness from God, Christianity:

·      takes a conditional, agenda-centered approach to people. One’s immediate practical needs for food, water, shelter, health, medical care, income, protection, and belonging are secondary to their need for salvation from hell. Therefore, essential, pressing needs are often minimally addressed with the expectation that the object of proselytizing will at least listen to the message of salvation and preferably accept it (and hopefully become an understudy evangelist). In some cases, handing out Bibles is prized over handing out food and water (this phenomenon and nearly all of the objections listed here, were made fun of in the Book of Mormon Broadway play, which criticizes the agenda-centered hypocrisy in all organized religion).

·      colonizes foreigners on their own soil. Christian missionaries go to foreign lands with the attitude, “We have the truth and lifestyle practices that you need in order to have a relationship with God and become more civilized, so adopt our way of life and spirituality.”

·      is a thriving business with very little interest or effort in resolving suffering in the world. Only a very small percentage of church tithing income goes to relieving poverty and suffering in the unreached world (a mere 0.1%), despite the fact that Christians earn about half of the gross income of the whole world.

·      is divisive and segregating, promoting and perpetuating an us vs. them mentality. They teach that “God so loves the world,” unless they decide that a certain person or group is beyond reach (or a black sheep like myself). In that case, they become a pollutant to the group and should be avoided and/or feared.

·      is exclusive, operating like a private club. You are in the club if you say the right prayer and live the way they believe you should be living. But you’re out if you break the rules too persistently or grievously.

·      has instigated many wars and atrocities throughout time (including modern day) through its ideologies. Aside from the horrors of events like the Crusades and the Holocaust (both religiously motivated), I find it perplexing how many Christians today vehemently defend and justify violent takeover of land through murder of innocent people in the name of “God.” These reprehensible offenses continue unchallenged because Evangelical Christianity has been brainwashed by certain interest group propaganda to believe that they are bringing heaven to earth in alignment with their religious duty, according to biblical prophecy. I remain vague intentionally.

Since when did Jesus ever sanction killing to obtain land and power? You will know them by their fruits.

And so, we face our conundrums: most of us enter this earth plane needing a community, a belief system, and a strong container to safely integrate ourselves into the human experience. But this container frequently causes untold injury and oppression to ourselves and others—psychologically, spiritually, and even physically. One’s ego initially needs the confines of religion, but one’s spirit cannot grow—or survive—within it. What to do?

Maybe at some point you realize the oppressiveness of your container and you want to leave it, but you’ve been in-doctrine-ated to fear that you are not safe without it. You’ve been programmed to believe you need it in order to safely progress in your spiritual journey. You also consider that the cost of leaving your container may be too high. If you want to look for God within, you will lose most of the people and connections that you’ve relied upon as your spiritual family because you suddenly become a threat to the control establishment. Black sheep are feared for their propensity to contaminate the whole. It also makes you responsible for your own growth, developing your own sense of discernment, and developing your ability to hear your own inner wise guide.

After a lifetime of paying someone else to do that job (or at least giving them permission), it feels daunting. But what is the alternative now that you have become more attuned to the light and power within yourself? A baby who has made passage out of the cramped darkness of the womb and into spacious light cannot be forced back into the birth canal.  

I want to make another point. Giving up the Christian (or other) container does not imply that you should think about trading it in for any other philosophy or creed (including New Age), which also has its own set of disempowerments and untruths. Whether it is another a major religion, or an eastern philosophy, a secret society, occult, or New Age movement, the ideology and resultant behavior is the same: that of a religious zealot.

When a shift is being made, I recommend reigning it in with patient acceptance, not letting the pendulum swing to another extreme, which leaves one more confused and ungrounded than before. It’s not about trading one oppression or confinement for another. It’s about finding the middle way. Inside of you there is exactly a middle ground between any two extremes or dogmas, the still point of your heart or Being. The seat of gut feelings, instincts, and intuition. That is where the seed of God resides within you. It is a safe place to allow yourself to linger as you grow into your newly developing strengths. It may feel uncomfortable at first, but that is the only way to begin hearing your own heart—by sitting with it. And it is the safest place you could ever be.

From the book, Our Universal Journey, by George Kavassilas:

“We, the Beings (spirits and souls) that occupy these Human vessels, are the oldest and the wisest in the Universe. We are the way showers and WE are the ones we have been waiting for! This notion that we must achieve a type of perfection by adhering to strict guidelines and rules through religious protocol and ritualistic processes, parroting prayers and incantations, are programs designed to achieve conformity and override one’s sovereignty. It is an authoritarian based construct whose foundational energy is fear” (pp. 88-89).

Though many of us have not fully tapped into it, we have within each of us an incredibly high level of ancient wisdom, knowledge, and Beingness that is ready to birth a new way of life for us.

How do we regard religion in light of this pursuit? I now clearly see religion as an obstacle to one's relationship with God, not a bridge. But we need not regret the past. Obstacles in our lives provide the best opportunity for growth and overcoming, which is likely why you are here today. Celebrate the path that has brought you to your liberation!