Student offers fun religious viewpoint

By Jared Epps 

Guest columnist 

There have been quite a few people writing about religious perspectives in the past few weeks, so I felt like jumping on the bandwagon.

I personally have no problem with religion itself. It’s perfectly okay for everyone to have their own beliefs and personal practices.

I draw the line when people start trying to assimilate other people into their own belief system while denying the apparent validity of other religions.

It would be nice if other people’s religious views didn’t have any affect on my life, but that’s just not the case.

Here’s a typical scenario I have experienced:  A random person I’ve never spoken to before suddenly approaches me wielding a bible of sorts, wanting to talk to me about a guy named Jesus Christ and how he saved humanity. I don’t need people trying to preach at me about things they’re too ignorant to understand. So I usually just smile and nod; I shouldn’t do that, because it gives them the wrong idea.

He then told me I’m going to hell if I don’t believe what he says. I’m a bit upset that these scare tactics are still being employed in the 21st century, but I’d be giving humanity too much credit to assume otherwise.

As for more ways that religious bigots have gotten on my nerves before, I have a friend whose parents take their own beliefs and hold people to their own silly standards.

I told this friend the best thing for him to do is to believe in whatever he wants to believe instead of being shoehorned into a religion by his parents, and this forever blacklisted me in their eyes as a “heathen”, or whatever Christians call unbelievers of their religion. 

 I don’t get why some Christians do this. They can accept the ridiculousness of their own religion, (because a guy’s decomposed corpse resurrecting itself is totally alright) but treat other belief systems with a level of contempt that borders on bigotry.

This kind of extreme fundamentalist behavior isn’t exclusive to Christians, but if you’ll ever be religiously discriminated against in America, it’s a safe bet it’ll be from a Christian group. I’m sure most Christians know they’ll have an eternity of wonderful things waiting for them as their corpses rot in the ground, so why do they feel the need to do God’s work and judge the rest of us?

If people have their own religious beliefs, they shouldn’t judge other people by those same irrelevant and often irrational standards. After all, can any religious fundamentalist have the absolute knowledge required to even know if a god exists? If a god does exist, why would she (aha!) even care what happens on our tiny, inconsequential blue speck of a planet? 

Anyway, if you want to believe in Yahweh, Allah, Christ, Buddha, Amon Ra, Cthulhu, or whoever, that’s great. Just remember they are beliefs about things nobody has any proof of, and they shouldn’t affect everyone else.