Blind Reason

At this point, it should be obvious that it isn't that is the problem - it's how people use it or interpret it. Any major religion has the truth within it, but so often it becomes distorted through the ignorance of the common man. Faith becomes something that involves no spiritual or mystical experience at all, and that the beliefs are used to make others wrong. If any of us were to pick up one of the holy books, we would find that modern beliefs are only an interpretation of them and aren't necessarily true. Our responsibility is to bring logic into our religious and spiritual beliefs, because without that, it becomes blind reasoning.

Richard Dawkins has a documentary showing the "Root of All Evil" within religions, and even though he hasn't destroyed religion or spirituality itself, he has pointed out all of the strange things that people believe in. There was a principal of this school where every page of the student's textbooks had the words "Jesus" or "God" on them. The principal said that Divine Law is nothing if it didn't come from God. Dawkins, being an atheist, pointed out that we can have reasonable laws without them coming from a divine source, but the principal said he would be happy to break the Ten Commandments if God said not to do them. He wasn't even able to understand why God or Moses said not to do those things. If we kill, for example, we know that isn't a desirable thing to do because of all the hatred, fear, guilt, and pain that is involved on the killer's side. We know that hatred must be involved to intentionally kill someone, and hatred never feels good, even though we might be addicted to expressing it.

I also looked up what different religions think of forgiveness, and certain people within these different religions act a certain way because of how they interpret what their holy books say to do. For example, some Jews will not forgive others unless the debtor says sorry for doing what they did, and that is their only reasoning for forgiving. Some Christians forgive because they believe that God will forgive them for forgiving. Both of these reasonings are based on their interpretations of their holy scriptures. However, a Buddhist said, "If we haven’t forgiven, we keep creating an identity around our pain, and that is what is reborn. That is what suffers." This reasoning comes from experience and not religious interpretations, and is completely outside the fact that the man who said it was a Buddhist. This is only an observation that anyone can make, which uses logic for reasoning.

I noticed that some religious reasoning sounds a lot like what commercials do. We have commercials that say, "This is a great offer,"and this is enough to convince people to buy or use what is being commercialized. We should use our reasoning and find out why we should really do something, not because someone says so. People focus on what religions say is bad or good without considering it themselves. How are we to know when statements are reasonable if we only have blind reasoning?