So, You Hate Religion, Huh?

In our last discussion, I confessed to you that "I Hate Religion", and I hope that you properly understood what I meant. If not, I'm really sorry.

I hate that.

In this post, I'd like to take the next step: If I hate religion, what am I (and what are you) supposed to do about it?

When it comes to things that we "hate", we typically aren't neutral about our behavior towards them, are we? For example, if I tell you that I hate snakes, it means the following:

- I don't like seeing them in the yard
- I don't like seeing them in a zoo
- I don't like seeing videos of them eating other animals
- I don't think it's funny when people make snake sounds to try and scare me
- If ever confronted by a snake, I would most likely: a. scream (probably like a girl, though I can't be certain), b. throw the nearest heavy object at it, and c. run away

In other words, when I say "I hate snakes", I mean it. I don't mean "I would prefer not to be around them", or "Those pesky snakes, I declare!" No, I mean that you will be able to TELL that I hate snakes if the subject (or an actual snake) comes up.

And I will most certainly not have a pet snake.

You might be thinking to yourself, "Of course you wouldn't have a pet snake if you hate snakes!" Good for you. You're thinking logically. Now, let's transfer that same logic over to the idea of "religion". If I say that I hate religion, that feeling should be accompanied with some obvious behaviors on my part towards religion, shouldn't it? For example, when I say that I hate religion, that should mean:

- I don't like it in myself, and when I see it, I recognize it & remove it
- I don't like it in others (because I love them & want the best for them), so I try to help them understand the truth about "religion" & help them remove it from their lives
- I proactively teach others about this issue because I think it's important
- I don't think it's funny when people make jokes about it (unless you're talking about that really funny joke where a Water Closet [bathroom] gets confused for a Wayside Chapel [church building] in a wacky correspondence between a curious woman and a foreign schoolmaster. Now THAT'S funny. Look it up. You'll laugh.)

So it might be a silly question to ask, "Am I going to keep religion around as a 'pet'? The answer is "no", but let's talk about what it might look like if we are keeping "religion" as a "pet", because I'm not so sure we understand this sometimes. When we keep religion as a "pet":

1. We feed it - This might mean that we keep "coming to church" long after we realize that we are completely disconnected from God; or it might mean that we "play politics" within the Lord's Church, treating it like a social club that exists for our benefit. Whatever the specifics might be, we "feed" our false/ineffective religion as if we care for it and want to keep it.
2. We make excuses for it - It might sound like this: "You'll have to excuse my religion; it's just too tired to do anything", or "My religion would do better, but it just hasn't been trained properly. I'll get around to it soon, though". The problem with this is really the same as the problems that come up when we make excuses for our actual pets: STOP MAKING EXCUSES FOR YOUR PET & ADDRESS THE PROBLEM!!!
3. We have a love/hate relationship with it - When we have a pet, we can go from warm & fuzzy hugs to a rolled-up newspaper pretty quickly, can't we? Although this is actually part of the normal process of disciplining a pet, I would describe this approach (for our purposes) as more random and arbitrary, and less consistent. We would often rather continue this love/hate relationship than to properly train our pet.
4. We give it a "name" - Every good pet has a name, and most religious people are no different. "I'm a _________", or "I'm a ______________", or, to mix things up a bit, "I'm a church of ___________". The truth is, God has given our "religion" some perfectly good names, so why do we keep picking new ones?
5. We clean up after it - When "religion" makes a mess (as it always does), we tend to clean up after it, realizing that it is really our fault.

So, to sum things up, let's all try to have the same attitude towards the wrongs kinds of religion that GOD has.

And let's try to act like it.