God's Favourite People

Recently, I was rejected by a woman based on the fact that I'm not religious enough for her. It was not the first time this happened, and not even the second; getting rejected because of religion is basically a hobby of mine at this point. What bothers me the most is that my conversations with this woman were very good until the moment I mentioned that I'm not religious; then everything turned to shit. This got me thinking about religion as a whole and how religion makes people behave in strange ways. Religion was supposed to teach people how to be more humble and tolerant. Yet, some of the most arrogant and intolerant people out there are religious. How can that be?

When people go to church for the first time, the church welcomes them with open arms, regardless of their background. This is a good thing because no matter how many mistakes a person made in the past, it's never too late to repent and try to become a better person. In the beginning, that's exactly what happens; people learn a lot of good things and get motivated to improve themselves. In that regard, religion is a lot like therapy. I wouldn't go as far as to say that going to church is better than therapy, but if you believe in God, it can be a good alternative.

So far, so good. A lot of people go to church to improve themselves and manage to do that, but it's when they reach their full potential that things start to go downhill. When people overcome their problems, they tend to be proud of themselves. That's also a good thing, but then they stop worrying so much about their own flaws and start paying more attention to the flaws of others. That pride quickly turns into arrogance. They don't choose to become arrogant; it all happens in the subconscious, and some of these people end up living the rest of their lives without ever realizing how arrogant they are.

This is a very common problem: people believing that they are God's favorite and that everyone who is not part of their religion is inferior to them in the eyes of the Lord. For the religion itself, this is a good mechanism to get more followers because their current followers will tell everyone they know something like "I am saved and you're not; you'll only be saved if you go to my church." The word "saved" itself is used as a synonym for superiority; people who are "saved" are better than the ones who are not. Ironically, in my opinion, many of the self-proclaimed Christians who go to church every week would go to hell if we judged them by their own standards.

The bottom line is that faith and character are two separate and completely different things, religion should be something personal. If you have a religion, you should use it to judge only yourself instead of imposing it on others. If you think you have more character than most people, yet you see everyone else as inferior, then you have no character at all. And if you believe that someone must go to the same church as you to go to heaven, then you're just plain stupid.

Religious people try to convert others by any means necessary: men show off the success they achieved thanks to God, and women position themselves as a prize if you convert, as if they have a golden vagina. On the other hand, you rarely see an atheist trying to make religious people lose their faith; they usually respect other people's decisions, even if they don't agree with them. Personally, I don't have anything against religion itself, but it's much better to be a humble atheist than an entitled moron.