When I, young and curious, began questioning religion, I wanted to find out why the stories didn’t make logical sense; and now after years of thinking about it I finally realized what you need to tell any story and create a moral: a strong Juul . Most of my family were raised in Texas, and they were strictly religious. My mother wasn’t super strict about it but about two years ago we started actually going to church. I hated every single time I went personally, the entire time it was just a bunch of old people singing. Not to mention the wretched smell of old perfume, I swear I was going to having an asthma attack and I don’t even have asthma. Either way I had to do anything to find a way not to go. As a joke at first I told my mom I didn’t believe in God, and that got me in a lot of trouble. Either way as time went on I started finding more and more things that discredited religion.. I also encountered a few religions like Buddhism and Hinduism that made me question the sanity of people in this era and BCE. Religion as a whole contains many things that discredit it: biological impossibility, the murder of innocent people, magic sticks, and flying monkeys.

I’d like to start out with the most important thing in Christianity, the birth of Jesus, which leads to biological impossibility. The lord and savior, born to the virgin Mary, keyword: virgin. Making literally impossible to give birth without intercourse happening. I personally find it interesting how we have so little on Mary’s past life. It is strange how there is only the Father of Jesus and not the mother. Throughout the rest of the New Testament we only hear about Mary when they talk about Jesus’ parents. Mary obviously wasn’t a very included parent though, and we also never hear about Jesus when he was younger. Of course we have Mary and the manger and the birth of Christ but seriously, did Jesus ever tell his dad, God, no? If so I bet he would get struck down with a bolt of lightning but either way we know very little about Jesus. Even though some miracles in the years 1095-1291 involve taking back the “Holy Land” and killing millions of people who have a different belief than you.

Next I think it’s noteworthy that we talk about Noah’s Ark, but I’d like to include the part where God apparently flooded the entire Earth killing everything and everyone that did not board Noah’s ark. Apparently the reason God flooded the entire Earth, his creation, and killed everything on it except Noah and his wife to cleanse it of sin.The earth became poisoned and unclean according to God, and I don’t think killing everyone was the best approach to cleansing the world. Did they have support groups for sinning back in that time? It could have been an Alcoholics anonymous but God controls it so it isn’t anonymous.. I mean only 99% of the world’s population God killed off in the flood, but it’s okay because God wanted it.

Religion also bothers me due to the fact that important religious figures always have some type of magic power or something that makes them extraordinary. For this example I’d like to mention Moses leading the Exodus. Moses was the man who lead the biblical Exodus. He basically freed all the Jews from slavery in Egypt, but on their way to Israel Moses realized the Red Sea stood in their way. Even though there was an entire ocean Moses had faith in the power of god and waved his magic stick around in the air. Moses definitely got some weird looks if I were to take an educated guess but I guess in the end it worked. After waving his magic stick around the Red Sea split in half like a stick, just cleared for Moses and the Jews to walk through. I’d also like to note that a lot of religious figures that have big standing, like Jesus, he got his own shrine. His shrine consisted of a big plus and his corpse hanging from it. He apparently came back to life though so that makes it all better. Magic sticks also make way for another reason why I personally don’t believe in religion, due to the wack things that happen.

Finally, and another reason why I think religion is illogical is the story about Hanuman. Hanuman is a flying monkey from Hinduism, and how the name “hanu” means jaw because when he was young he tried to fly to the sun because he thought it was a fruit. Out of all things to come up with to stretch logic thin the people who wrote the Hindu scripture they came up with a flying monkey. I remember being in class and learning about this, to have my friend shout out in class “What drugs were these people on”? Those words really resonated with me because they made so much sense. The genuine absurdity of religion sometimes make me want to tell people who believe in it to understand that their entire belief is a lie. Of course I would never do that because it takes a lot of effort and faith to believe, but it is just more than I bargain for.

Overall, I personally believe religion as something that doesn’t make a lot of sense, and I have many more reasons why. Either way I believe that “virgin” Mary birthing Jesus,”, does not make sense to me. Also killing off your entire creation, or the majority of the Earth’s population for “cleansing of sin” doesn’t sound like a good reason to me. Finally splitting entire ocean’s with a stick doesn’t really come to reality. While writing this paper I was forced in to going to church as usual, and I was going to show my mother this paper to try and get out of it, but I’d rather not get whipped with a belt. Also I know that most of the stories have deeper meaning and philosophers spent years looking into it, but I just can't find any meaning in it. It’s like literature teachers and poems, the poet will just want to write something nice to give to someone and then literature teachers tear apart every single word in it. Another important thing, all due respect towards people who have strong faith in their religion, it really takes some strength to keep believing and having faith even through bad times. Everyone can own a spectrum of belief within religion, I just can’t find my spot on it. That idea though just doesn’t work with me because I believe in keeping things secular, I strongly believe in evolution too. Personally though, I believe that religion, Christianity and Judaism, fall apart as a whole in some of the stories, and contain virgin women giving birth, drowning the entire world, and the power to split entire oceans.