Religion and World Peace (a contradiction unto itself)

I'm not a writer by any means, but occasionally I like to put my thoughts down in writing. Here's the product of about two hours of idle time:

World peace is an impossibility while religion remains in our lives. It's a simple fact, but one that many people fail to grasp. Religious intolerance, as well as religious compulsion to commit violence, is the big reason for this.

For example, Jews have suffered almost since their beginning, for no other reason than the fact they were Jewish. Discrimination borne from religious intolerance goes back even before medieval times. If there was a problem with almost anything, it was the Jews' fault, and civil reasons for these accusations were either made up on the spot, or simply not bothered with at all.

When the Black Plague raged across Europe, the majority of the people claimed that the Jews were poisoning the water sources, and were subjected to torture and put under threat of death in order to "confess" to these charges. Those "guilty" were sentenced to brutal and violent deaths. Such claims were completely outrageous, however, since the Plague made no discrepancies as to who fell ill.

The greatest single act of discrimination in the history of mankind had a largely religious basis. Adolf Hitler followed in the footsteps of millions before him, who turned Jews into targets of torture and abuse. He, however, would walk along that path further than anyone else had ever gone. Throughout World War II he used the Jews as scapegoats; blaming them for Germany's extreme depression after World War I, forcing them into ghettos and then making news reports of them to "show the public how they lived in filth and decrepit wrecks" in order to lower their status even more in the eyes of the rest of the community, and making them a priority in the death camps and concentration camps scattered across Europe. He made this genocide a higher priority than even the war effort, diverting resources and trains to the camps that could have gone to the military forces. Hitler even forced other countries to follow his example with the "proper" treatment of Jews. The Holocaust was not focused exclusively on Jewish people, but after killing two thirds of the entire European Jewish population, one can hardly deny that religious discrimination played a part.

According to the Islamic faith, Muslims cannot go to Paradise until all of the Jews in the world are dead. This is but one more problem that stands in the way of peace; unlike most other causes, however, this one does not lie with moral standards. Instead, it is from a religion, compelling its followers to wage war against another religion. Devoted Muslims do not see this as immoral; rather, it is the correct thing to do. That is why, left to their own devices, they would not stop until their goal was reached.

The Aztec belief was fraught with human sacrifice. They would capture enemy soldiers from war, kill them with a sharp rock at an alter on the top of their sacred pyramids, and let the blood run down the steps. Often, the blood was mixed into their sacred cacao drink. The team that lost a match in one of their sacred ball games would be sacrificed. They also believed that their god, Quetzalcoatl, required a virgin girl to be sacrificed every month, so the sun would continue to rise.

The violence and hatred associated with religion is profound. Many religious works claim countless crimes as punishable by death, many of which relate directly to the religion and have no worldly significance. Thousands of people have been burned at the stake, accused of witchcraft. The Bible tells of a man who was stoned to death for swearing. God himself supposedly burned two men alive for using the wrong incense in an offering. These men were the sons of Aaron, friend of Moses and himself a priest. He turned a woman into a pillar of salt for looking back at her home as He destroyed it. Or so the story says.

I have only touched the surface on the bloody tendencies of religion. Of course, if anyone brings up such violent topics, theists will simply shrug it off as they have so many other inconvenient truths. It's a sad notion, but unlike the fantasies they choose to dwell in, it's the truth.

I am not by any means trying to say that religion is the only thing in the way of peace. Resources, land, nationalism, racism, xenophobia, and many other factors also pose a problem. But faith is likely going to prove the most difficult to overcome. Why? Because religion gives "answers" where there is nothing but uncertainty, and tells the believer what he or she wants to hear. Humans as a whole like to think we have all the answers. In a world we have barely begun to understand, most of us cling to religion because it is the easy way out, because it explains away what we don't understand as some greater being, working with a greater comprehension. This self indulgence cannot last, for our sake and for the sake of our planet. We have tens of thousands of nuclear weapons at the ready, enough to destroy the world several times over. We must come together and realize that the fate of the world is NOT in God's hands, regardless of what we want to think. We have the power of God at our fingertips, and in the wrong hands this power will be used and abused until Earth is no more than a smoldering wreck. We no longer have the luxury of allowing a divine being to run our lives and our world, and it will take a large support of reason and science to show everyone that we never had such a luxury to begin with. We must stand up and take responsibility for our own actions. Our fate, and that of our world, depends on it.