Reasons I Am Antireligious Part 1

I am antireligious. This means that not only do I not subscribe to any religion, but I believe they are all false, destructive, and dangerous. There have been many obstacles and experiences which lead me to this conclusion, which I won't discuss here, but it's been an interesting journey. Raised by my Christian mother and occasionally during my life seeing my fundamentalist Christian father, I was so brainwashed by this religion that I stood in front of the church quoting Bible verses and once gathered a petition to ban all forms of abortion, based on Bible verses.

Ironically, my travels abroad as a missionary to convert Norwegians, Australians, and Belarussians were the first prompts that made me begin questioning my faith. My first deep encounter with a non-Western culture came when I studied abroad in Viet Nam as a college student. Confronted with a culture that had developed entirely differently than Anglo-American society; Vietnamese had a completely different way of thinking about the world, which really stunned me.

I think the point where I ultimately lost hope in Christianity came at a point when I was in Santa Barbara, meeting the chair of the Geography Department in hopes of studying there for my Master's Degree. I was in the library and on the wall was a map of the United States showing the geographic distribution of religion/Christian denominations. It struck me like a lightning bolt, and all of a sudden my experiences abroad made sense: religion is geography. This is also the first argument I will make for being antireligious.

1) Religion is geography.
Basically, most citizens of America are Christians simply because they were born in America. If they had been born in Viet Nam, for instance, they would probably be Buddhist. In Yemen and they would be Muslim. Closer to home, Baptists "rule" the south. Catholicism dominates the Northeast, Mormons reside predominantly in Utah. This makes sense because religion is a part of culture. The only logical conclusion that a Christian could make is of the superiority of America, since we have found the "true religion", and those "other countries" are worshiping "false gods". This question borders on cliche, but let me ask it anyway: How does any religion have the right to say that they are correct and that all other religions are wrong? Where is the support for this kind of statement? And if you don't say that your religion is the only right one, then what's the point of following yours?

2) Tradition vs. Truth
Most religious practices that I am aware of are tradition, not mandates. By mandates I mean something that they were instructed in their holy book. For instance, the Christian Bible was gradually canonized by a panel of men, not "God". These men over time decided which letters, stories, and visions complied with their version of God, canonized those into their Bible, and discarded the rest (examples of rejects are the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, and later, with Protestantism, the Apocrypha). Now, many books of the Bible were once canonized, but later discarded. This leads me to ask why if, according to Christians, the books were chosen through inspiration of God, there were some which were accepted only to be thrown out later. Were they once holy, but not any more?

In Judaism, the western wall (AKA Wailing Wall) is held almost as a deity to be worshiped, simply because it supports the area where Solomon once built his temple. This is not mandated by their religious texts.

In Islam, women are told that covering their faces and being inhumanely submissive to men obtains respect and blessing from Allah. As far as I know, these particular practices are not mandates.

More to come later.