[quote_center] “God is an ever receding pocket of scientific ignorance.” [/quote_center]

[quote_center]”If you’re going to stay religious at the end of the conversation, god has to mean more to you than just where science has yet to tread.” [/quote_center]

I personally find this to be an incredibly powerful notion. I would argue most adherents to modern religions would be quick to agree that the Sun is the center of our solar system, that Earth is indeed round, that gravity exist and is tangible and has laws that keep our feet planted firmly to the ground everyday; they agree with the breakthroughs of science and it’s removal of our ignorance.

Yet in the next breath these same people are likely to tell you the Earth is 10,000 years old and that evolution is a myth.

This incredible duality of hypocrisy in the religious realms is so obvious, though we rarely draw attention to it. We’ve seemed to become so used to the notion of the “faithful” picking and choosing which tenants work for them, regardless of their claim to be pure, that we don’t even call out this most blatant cognitive dissonance that a great swathe of our society live in.  And I’ll admit, in some ways I respect the picking and choosing, for it seems to me to be more aligned with spirituality without rules,  and thus freethought– perhaps one of the most important principles I try to promote and live by.

But what does it say about our society when half our planet, and quite often the leaders of our nations, must join in this farce for acceptance, must lie to themselves to perpetuate their belief in a fairy tale?

What’s the future hold as this trend continues, as science makes the dark-corners smaller and smaller? What happens when the religious claim to “creation” becomes looser and looser?

Will we push religion into such a small niche that it’s influence is negligible?

To be honest, I hope so. I look forward to such a future, because I think this kind of denial is unhealthy; it is like the feeding of the Jungian shadow. It is a repression of rationality that only stands to cause mental anguish upon those who subject themselves to it. I want us to move away from a society that relishes in ignorance so that it can escape responsibility for self, each other, and our world at large. We need people of action, not prayer. Prayer will not fix this broken world, I assure you. We need people who are willing to take the reins of existence and be forces of good, not apathetic self-proclaimed do-gooders who do nothing to stop evil because in their eyes it’s “gods-will,” all part of his plan.

Not only is it insulting that “god” has a sex ( which “coincidentally” is male in a patriarchal world), but no god should plan suffering.

We should be the gods. Each one of us. We should embrace our power, not enfeeble ourselves to fit into some false cult. And our will, as gods, should be the kind that heals and helps, that inspires and creates, that loves and laughs.

It’s important to note that I’m not saying religions are inherently evil; I think many people have benefitted from the morality laid within their thick text and teachings. But I also think they divide people and are the root of much of the hatred. Look at deaths that have been caused in “the name of my god,” whether it’s the crusades or 9/11 or the conflicts in the middle east. Certainly some of the wars have been deemed as religious wars when they were truly political and economical, but if we take away the excuse of religion, we take one step closer to the truth. We take one more step towards responsibility and accountability.

You see, can’t turn a god into a pariah, but you can make actions in society so unacceptable as to make the likelihood of even thinking about committing them a social suicide. So much so that through generational shifts, such atrocities are so far out of mind for our children that such sin becomes nearly non-existent.

But I digress. You see, the true evils I think of religion, of this God in the Gaps mentality, is that is binds us from moving forward together. It is a shackle in tradition, a cultural poison that prevents us from ever being a healthy organism upon this planet. It is an excuse for the weak willed and the scared. It lets people be okay with not bettering themselves or society. They say, “Sure, all the answers are here in this book. Now I guess I can stop trying to make the world a better place, because God made it in his image and everything that happens happens for a reason.”

No. No, no, no. We need fighters who are willing to look at our society and our impact upon the planet and say: “We’ve made mistakes. God played no hand in this. Man was the cause of this pain and suffering and ego and greed and isolation and hatred. If we are to fix it, praying over our beds at nights and congregating in a building and singing songs won’t fix it. We need to come together and be compassionate engineers. We need to stop adhering to ridiculous fairytales that divide us and cause us to hate each other. We need use technology to create a global hivemind that allows us all to communicate as one so we can share our perspectives and erase our ignorances that make us think we’re somehow different from each other, that our ridiculous creation myths are “the right one.” And then, once we’re together as one, we can put our energy into fixing the planet rather than wasting time on diplomacy and hatred and competition.”

The true heaven is already here, and we do not need to wait until death to get there; we simply need to kill the god in the gap that’s holding us back.