I find myself constantly under the suspicion that I absolutely hate religion and religious people, when in reality, it's nothing even along those lines.
I don't hate religion, though I do disagree with alot of it, I find that it has helped to shape the human race into what it is today. Without religion, the order of the world would have taken much longer to develop into what we call modern society. Without religion, their would be much more despair in both the past and the present, as it's given those that found themselves pushed over and then stomped to the ground by the cruel boot of life something to believe in, something to assist them on picking themselves back up.
I will admit, back in the infancy of my atheism, I was very aggressive and in some cases completely off-the-hook rude. I do indeed regret that, but find it did assist me in understanding my atheism and others strength of belief.
The reason I was so aggressive is mainly due to the fact that I didn't completely understand atheism, let alone religion as much as I should have before actually going on these violently angry rants.
Anyways, as I was saying about religion, it's acted as a sort of frame-work for humanity and human beliefs, and for that it does indeed deserve respect, despite the fact that along with keeping humanity in tact, it also lead to some very discriminatory and cruel campaigns against people of other beliefs.
As I see it, the Bible is taken much to literally both historically and in contemporary times, as it's easy to see that most (if not all) of the content in the Bible is meant to be metaphoric and not actually literal; for example: Jesus being the son of God? Isn't it widely said that we are all God's children? What made Jesus so special? I mean, so what? He did some amazing things; so did Nelson Mandela and even George Clooney. What stops them from being the sons of God?
In all honestly, I have no problem with liberalized religion, as they don't reject the ideas of others and they accept the idea of evolution, or, at the least, give it some decent credit.
It's fundamentalist religion I have a problem with; not only do they completely reject the ideas of others when it comes to the creation of life, they plug their ears, start dancing around and begin to chant "Lalalala! I can't hear yoouuuu!!" and in some cases even kill people over the entire subject.
These people always tend to have a very narrow outlook on life, and rarely give themselves the chance to experience what lies beyond their doorstep.
Even these people I don't hate; I mean, in theory I do, but it's more that they frustrate me incredibly. Some of these people have reason that they retain that type of mind-set: they may have grew up surrounded by nothing but heavy fundamentalism, they may have gone through an incredible amount of trauma, and coincidentally happened to pray either before or after the trauma occurred and found things getting better, even if in reality the entire situation was in the same state it was half and hour ago.
I find it quite offensive when people tell me that I must hate religion and people of religious beliefs. In fact, my own mother and her side of the family is Christian, one of my best friends is Agnostic, another three are Catholic, another two are, again, Christian, another is Muslim, another Unitarian, and another Jewish. In fact, I only know one other person who directly identifies himself as an Atheist. My father and most (if not all) of my family on my fathers side don't say they believe in a God, but do not directly identify themselves as Atheists.
The biggest difference between the religious people I know and fundamentalists are that they take a liberal approach to the world around them, and if they don't, they at least listen to what others have to say, even if they may not take it as seriously as they could.
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