A pragmatic perspective on religion
I'm not anti-religion I'm just a free thinker. I believe in freedom of religion and question everything. Some things stand out for me in the debate over religion. If God is all seeing and all knowing then he knows all consequences. The consequences of what I would have to call patenting the spirit realm, or in my opinion all good people's spirits going to live in a realm of light for all eternity, as an exclusive club for one group of religious people no matter how bad they were doesn't seem fair or like something a loving God would do who loves all of his creations. The consequences of that from a Christian standpoint would be over 6 billion people burning in hell for all of eternity when they die no matter how good of a person they were. God would know that creating an exclusive afterlife for only one section of religious people would create holy wars against other religions in the name of saving souls by ending lives and conquering and forcing one religion onto the world through war and devastation which would lead to hundreds of millions of deaths. If God can do anything and God cares about the greater good what is the greater good making a spirit realm where all good people ascend into a realm of light for all of eternity and can come back and interact with the people and possibly be Spirit guides or an exclusive afterlife that excludes 3/4 of his creations and condemns them to eternal damnation forever? And if God loves all of his creations to answer seemed obvious to me. And based on stories from mothers with children that could only be explained by reincarnation I believe the soul reincarnates and has for millennia. I think everyone should be allowed to ask these kind of questions and think for themselves. Don't get me wrong though, I'm not saying religion cannot be a force for good and someone's life and in the world. I just see Christians acting nothing like Jesus, not following his teachings, not following the positive commands of God and doing harmful things and not feeling bad about it. And there is a case to be made that morality does not require religion. I'm sure you can find a good number of atheists and agnostics who have a strong moral compass but absolutely no religious foundation for their moral compass and if there are exceptions to a rule it's not really a rule it's an overgeneralization or an oversimplification. In this case I think it's making something natural, having a moral compass, religious when that's not necessarily the case.