The Truth About Religion (Part 1)

This day has been waiting to come... and now it's here.
I've been trying to decide how best to approach the issue of religion. I think now I've got it.

Religion is simple: it's something created by people to explain what happens to their loved ones when they die. Nothing more, nothing less. In most cases, religion involves some sort of "Supreme Being", but not all do. Some religions involve reincarnation, and the belief that all souls undergo a cycle of different lives, as different animals, before being allowed into the afterlife. Others are based around the idea that each person's soul has one life on earth to live before being judged worthy to enter the afterlife.

The former is fairer, the latter not so much so.
The reason being that a person's soul reincarnates until the karma is good enough for them to go to the afterlife, regardless of what gender or anything else that that person is in one life. In the other, you only live once, and you are what God has made you. Some monotheistic religions even discriminate against women, and I believe all of them discriminate against homosexuals.
Which brings me to my point.

I was raised Catholic. My dad being the Catholic one and my mum raised without religion, due to bad things that happened to my grandmother when she was a child. My mum did convert to Catholicism, though, and so now I am part of a family of Catholics, except for my mum's side of the family (minus my mum, of course). So now I'm enrolled in a confirmation class that supposed to prepare me for the sacrament of Confirmation in two years.
Unfortunately for my dad's Catholic side of the family, however, I have no plans to be confirmed.

My qualms with Catholicism began two years ago, mostly because of the horrible molestation cases that were rampant in the news. A year later, I read Elie Wiesel's Night, which was an amazing novel. It brought the horrors of Hitler's Nazi Germany and the labour/extermination camps home. It also made me wonder why an all-loving God would put his people through such a horrible life just for so that they might be in Heaven. Catholics preach "free will" and all that, but how free is "free will" if it means one person is free to take away every freedom known to man from millions of innocent people? Catholics and Christians preach that the freedom to be evil is necessary, and only really causes one to lose their own chance of going to Heaven, and doesn't affect others' chance of going to the Promised Land. But it really does. From evil spawns evil. Maybe, in the end, God really does know best. But history says otherwise.

Following this little run-in with God, I made my arguments to my mother, and she consented to putting me through Confirmation for one year, rather than two, before I had to make my choice about whether or not to continue this path to a life of religion (She has since "forgotten" that she said I would only have to do it for one year, and has been telling me that I'll have to go through the second year, too. This, I can assure you, will never happen). However, everything I said made no impact on my mother's own beliefs. It made me realise that I need charisma classes.

The real turning point in my revelations about God and religion came a few months ago, when I read something out of the Bible that nearly made my heart stop.
I had been raised with the belief that God loved all his wee human creations, no matter how they had been made. 1 Corinthians 6, 9-12, told me otherwise.
From that selection....
"Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral . . . nor practising homosexuals . . . will inherit the kingdom of God."
That was like a slap in the face.
I had been doubting God for some time, but it still shook me terribly on the inside.
Everything sacred I had grown up with was a lie.

That was pretty distressing.
After a while, though, new thoughts came into my mind.
What kind of an all-loving God is He that He automatically, from birth, decides that a select few of his followers will be excluded from His kingdom, regardless of the quality and fullness and goodness of the lives they had led? If God is all-loving, however, and this book is the fallacy, that still throws the entire religion and system of beliefs into question, simply because they are all based on that one book. Therefore, the God who wrote it can either not exist, or his religion can not portray him correctly. If the latter is the case, then that makes one wonder if he exists at all. In the end, we come back to the same conclusion: that God as we know him does not exist.
If he does, he is not God, but another supreme entity.

Well there goes Catholicism out the door, but what about other monotheistic religions? Judaism doesn't work because Jews believe in the same God. Islam doesn't work because it is exceptionally discriminatory and I don't align myself with any Islamic beliefs.

Where does that leave me?
With this conclusion:
Religion in all forms discriminates against certain minorities of the population, whether it intends to or not.
God as we know him does not exist.
Religion as we know it is a lie.
What we can look for after our life on this earth is only for Time to tell.

My mother brought this point to light maybe a year ago:
If we have no God or Heaven to look forward to after this life, and if we have no reason to believe that we'll see our loved ones again, what reason do we have to be good or loving? What reason do we have to love?

Although I could not answer that at the time, I can answer it now. My answer is that there isn't an answer. We are good because it is right. I am rejecting my previously-held beliefs about God, religion, and Heaven in favour of a more open approach to life and death, and I am content to be good in the hope that a universally accepting afterlife awaits me after I die.

With this approach, I do not need to believe in God to be good. I need to believe that whatever awaits me will have a just conscience, and judge me based on how I treated those around me, with kindness, patience, love, and empathy (as much as a human can), rather than what gender, sexuality or ethnicity I am.

People should be good because they know it's right, not because they fear the consequences (Hell, namely) of not being so.
Humans need to embrace themselves with an open mind and an open heart, and, while adhering to whatever beliefs they may, accept the idea that all people are born inherently free of evil, no matter what beliefs or lifestyles others may follow.