Learn to question everything, that includes religion

I should have been taught about the facts of life first and also which parts of the Bible to read, to avoid contradictions. For whatever reason I was told to learn the 10 Commandments – Thou shalt not kill is one that I could understand. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour was a bit of a problem at first, the Sunday school teacher explained that what was meant by ‘false witness’ was ‘do not tell lies’ ever.

As a naughty child I would skip parts of the Bible that I couldn’t understand or found to be boring (which were many) but when I came to Deuteronomy I found some really interesting bits and many contradictions. God told the Israelites to kill all the Amorites and various other tribes. Was this the same God that commanded us not to kill? The first three commandments I could never understand as a child, probably because I had it in my head that God was more than merely superhuman. However, when I went back to Genesis even as a child I had to ask myself questions, because all of the adults that I could trust were believers, my questions were always brushed aside with a ‘What right do you think you have to question the word of God?’ I was afraid to say ‘No, the word of man’.

As an adult I have grown out of believing in any ‘myth’. This god now appears to suffer from a severe case of paranoia. I now imagine heaven as being a kind of divine North Korea, one would have to spend every minute praising this extremely vain and self-confessed jealous god, just as the North Korean people apparently have to continuously praise their dictator. As no one has ever come up with concrete evidence disproving the common law of nature, I am happy to think that after death will be like it was before I was born. I can remember nothing of that time.

All this because I was brought up in the Christian Baptist faith. If I had been born in Saudi Arabia I would probably be a Sunni Muslim, born in Myanmar I could well be Buddhist. It is not illegal to abandon the Christian religion, at least not in Europe at the present time. Mankind has created numerous gods over thousands of years but most have fallen out of favour. I can understand ignorant, uneducated people worshipping the sun, praying that it would reappear to create a new day. Knowledge is the key, question everything, faith is what it is, belief in something without any evidence of its existence whatsoever.

B. DUQUEMIN,

Address withheld.