Religion is a crutch to fall on.
It removes responsibility from oneself and moves it to a higher power (on both ends God and Satan). I actually think that believing something other than the good within yourself is selfish and weak.
You can sin and be forgiven, God moves in mysterious ways, it's the work of the Devil, life after death, a second chance, a better place etc. etc..
The world is fair as it stands without God, math and science pretty much dictate what happens, and what we don't know, we figure out with logic, not psychobabble.
My sister and her husband WERE (thank GOD (oh, the irony)) devout Pentacostals (crazy Christians that "spoke in tongues" (bullshit because the pastor's wife would speak in the same weird shit (claiming not to understand what it meant) EVERY TIME, they didn't like it when I called them out)).
I talked to them at depth on my views on how good can be innate without the need for a personal god. Things can feel right or wrong without a belief in religion. All they said is that they "need" to believe in something. I respected that to an extent, but it seems to me that is a form of weakness or inability to cope with the unknown or the uncontrollable. Granted we all share these feelings, but some of us would rather choose to find the answer through possible means (*cough* science), rather than being lazy, pretending, and coming up with an answer with no solid proof or evidence. That is LYING to yourself. That is a false Prophet. The hypocrisy of it all is staggering.
Believing in a "personal" God is silly. What if my God told me I'm better than you? What if he told me to kill those I believe have sinned? If a God is to exist, he has to for all people under the same conditions, otherwise my God is better than yours.
God-Devil = Positive-Negative, Enthalpy-Entropy, Yin-Yang, Matter-Antimatter. The universe has opposites or it wouldn't exist. But those opposites aren't fairy tale characters. Good would never exist without Evil, because you wouldn't be able to tell one from the other if the other did not exist. So will God defeat Satan in Revelations? Nope, they need each other. Revelation is the likely the universe crunching back together in a singularity. Back to square one. Logical. Cyclical.
God being an Alien that intervened in our evolution makes more sense than some ethereal being caring about what little ants on a speck of dust in the universe quarrel over. "He" knows how everything will turn out in the end so why bother "creating" in the first place? Dust to dust, ash to ash.
I have faith in logic, the inherent "good" in humanity, and science. Love still exists but not necessarily a "God".
- whew....
