Repost from 3/18/2002 - Lost from previous websites. 

            I have three beautiful female friends that are intelligent, artistic and quite religious. I have for many years admired them. The other night during a very enjoyable conversation about everything, and nothing, one of them made a comment that has troubled me deeply. I happened to be telling them about a difficult biology class I had taken a few semesters ago, and the subject turned to evolution. At dinner that night, my friend stated that evolution is a myth created by science to draw our attention away from God. That statement in and of itself was enough to send a cold shiver down my spine, but it was the next that turned my blood to ice. I asked her why she believed that, and she simply stated, “I believe it because it’s the truth. My church said so.”

            Karen can believe in evolution or not, that’s not my problem. It scares the hell out of me to think she believed it just because someone told her too. As a child we accept what we are told, as an adult, we must question it. It’s like a type of “spiritual peer pressure.” Fast Food Religion: get on the bus, just be sure you don’t rock the boat. Our beliefs, no matter what they are, should not be a static thing. They should grow and change with us.

            What happens to us when we stop questioning what we are told? We loose freedom. An invisible barrier has just been crossed, and it becomes easier and easier to cross it each time. In most cases, we simply loose a bit of ourselves and our identity becomes more and more generic. In other cases, it’s catastrophic. How did you feel when you saw the films of people celebrating in the streets when America had been attacked? That is the end result of complacency. Those people didn’t really hate America; they hated what they had been told of America.

As long as Karen’s belief stays unquestioned, it will be like a cancer inside of her. It will sit there in the back of her mind and to some degree influence everything else about her. Ignorance and intolerance breed upon themselves, and the only cure is self-evaluation and examination. The problem is, it isn’t easy.

            The word Catharsis means to undergo a spiritual rebirth through the suffering of hardship. It comes from the Greek word that means, “to pass a hard stool.” It is supposed to be difficult to settle into our ideals; otherwise they crumble in the face of adversity. If our beliefs are handed to us, or force-feed to us, then they are worthless. They are dangerous and dehumanizing. This is not a sermon to go out and find religion; it is a plea to question what you have already been told.

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