I feel like religion is a necessary evil. I was raised religious (protestant, various), and maintained my religiousity until my early twenties, and slowly but surely started to reevaluate what I actually believed vs. what I held on to because I didn’t want to stop believing that my parents knew everything.

I now subscribe to an “I don’t know ****” philosophy. I believe that there is a God, for no other reason than I just have a sense. But I don’t believe anything in particular about the nature of God. In fact, I would say I have opinions on some of the various possible personalities of God.

1: If he’s supposed to be this totally loving creator, loving all of us equally, without prejudice, then how could hell exist? Because I *don’t* love everyone equally, without prejudice, and I would be hard pressed to send anyone to hell if I was given that opportunity.

2: If he’s vindictive and *does* send people to hell, then I’m not interested in being one of his people. I refuse to worship out of fear. I would worship out of respect, love, trust, etc. Not fear. Nope.

3: This seems most likely to me. God is laissez-faire. He built the earth, and all within it, and said “That’s some cool **** right there!” And now he sits back and watches as we do what we do. I think God is more like an anthropologist, and we are a grand science experiment. And I’m fine with that.

But I do think religion is necessary. I believe humanity, as a whole, is inherently good. I think we do ****ty things, and I think there are certainly people who are bad to the core, but in general I think we incline to good. And I think some people can achieve a balance without religion, and some people either need religion to remind them of how to be, or they need the support to work through the difficult times in their lives, or maybe they feel like they need the punishment so they don’t behave in some of the ways they might otherwise do…because some people *do* respond to fear. And maybe they actually believe all the things that are in their religious doctrine, or maybe they just fool themselves into thinking they believe those things. I’m sure it’s different for every, single person.

Unfortunately, you also have those bad seeds who take the good in religion and turn it around to abuse people, both mentally/emotionally and physically. I think religion, at least the more controlling forms of it, will eventually go the way of the dinosaurs, and we’ll start to see more people embracing things like Buddhism or Unitarian Universalism. Less God, more golden rule, if you will. That takes some of the control out of being an adherent, and allows people to be good because it’s the right thing to do.