Blog #8

The amount of oppression due to religion has been a fascinating subject to me. As a child I was brought out Roman Catholic in a primarily white Irish family. I read the bible, went to CCD, got my first Communion, but I was never confirmed. Before 9/11, we had crusades and the holocaust and after we became racist against Arabic looking individuals because our culture decided that all Arabic looking people must be terrorist. Obviously, this is not true for all of the American public all though we allow it to happen every day.
I have always been disgusted by religion. For a while, I did not believe in god when I was young because I never believed that the religion meant anything strong enough to kill each other over it. I thought we were all trying to pray to the same ideological god. I believe in spirituality through basic idea of mind-body connection and meditation while I try to put Buddhism into a twenty first century prespective because I believe that it is the least out-of-date religion. Yes, that is right. I believe religion is an out-of-date primitive understanding of our existence.
When I read "Breaking a Sacred Taboo," I am fully aware of the disparity in this country between full separation of church and state. The government provides Christianity with full recognition. For religion to be truly free in this country, we must have national religious holidays for all religions and maybe your work allows you to take the day off depending on which religion you are.
Other religions are marginalized and oppressed to such a sickening degree. I have felt this personally. I consider myself to be an atheist. I have called myself one since I was about 14 years old. As I mentioned before, my family is Roman-Catholic and Irish people to not tolerate other religious beliefs. It is simply ingrained in the culture. I announced to my extended family, stupidly during a family Christmas party, that I did not believe in god and that Jesus was probably alive at some point, but his legacy was fabricated for the development of our ancient civilization. My family told me that I must worship the devil and they took all of my Christmas present back and told me until I believed I would not receive any gifts for any religious holidays. Every time I see my family they repeatedly ask me whether I believe in god "yet" as if sooner or later it was inevitable. I can see it their eyes and in their hearts that they mean well but they do not understand my perspective. They believe that unless I accept god that I can never be happy in this life and I will have a "Flash Pass" directly to hell. I believe in the ideal of being the best person you can without oppressing or degrading anyone else.
I just never understood why that religious oppression existed because I believed and still believe that it is such an individualized understanding of human existence that, to me, had nothing to do with this planet, but has everything to do with a personal comforting affect due to the oppression of individuals due to other things. What I mean by that is religion was the hierarchy of Western civilization for so many years and allowed for political and economical hierarchies to exist through religious interpretation. Once upon a time, religion was the privilege structure of Western civilization and now it is money, race, sex, creed, sexual orientation etc. Maybe we should regress backwards, so they all one thing to fight against instead of several different struggles to overcoming? I am only joking.