How Religion Can Improve or Ruin Your Life

BY SOFO ARCHON

This is the transcript of a spontaneous talk.

Ever since I was a teenager, I have been fascinated with religion, and I have spent years of my life studying the religions of the world. That is because I find that most religions contain kernels of wisdom that can help us to live more peaceful and more fulfilling lives.

Now, I don’t consider myself to be religious — at least not in the conventional sense. I’m not a Christian or a Hindu or a Buddhist or a Muslim. I don’t identify with any religious ideology or belief system whatsoever. That is because I find that when we identify with a religious ideology, we tend to see our religion as the perfect one that contains the absolute truth. And when we do that, we usually bring a lot of trouble and pain into our lives.

When we see our religion as the perfect one that was handed to us by God, we try to follow its dogma and set of rules in order perhaps to live more happily or maybe to please people in our religious community or even to please God and be sent to heaven in the afterlife. But many times those set of rules don’t bring us any happiness whatsoever. Instead, they bring us a lot of suffering because they suppress us emotionally and ruin our lives, because they make us live a life that we don’t truly deep down want to live.

In addition, when we see our religion as the perfect one that contains the absolute truth, we tend to accept the beliefs of our religion without questioning them, even if we have not reached to them from our own experiences, from our own understanding — even if we just blindly believe them, because they are supposedly given to us by God. And when information is presented to us that contradicts our beliefs, we simply reject it. We don’t take it into serious consideration.

Lastly, when we see our religion as the perfect one, we tend to see other religions as bad or even inimical to our own. A lot of Christian traditions, for example, see other religions as created by the devil. They see them as evil. And the people who are Christians tend to see those religions as evil, and by extension, those who believe in those religions and adhere to them. That’s why you see that there have been so many wars in the name of religion and God throughout history. That’s why you see, to this day, different religious groups fighting constantly against each other.

My approach to religion is the following: I see scriptures and religious teachings merely as information, and I study that information, and I evaluate it, and I keep what contributes to my understanding and to my well-being. And what doesn’t, I discard or even openly criticize. Earlier I said that religions tend to contain plenty of kernels of wisdom. But they also contain a lot of ugly, negative, perverted stuff. And most so-called religious people are not even aware of that, because they don’t even study the scriptures and the tradition of their own religion!

If you consider yourself to be religious, I would suggest you to study deeply your religion. And you might come to see that it is not perfect after all. You will come to see both its positive and negative sides. And perhaps you will start questioning it a little bit and not just blindly accepting and following it. I would also suggest you to study religions other than your own. And you might come to see that they are not so bad after all. Perhaps you might come to see that they are more valuable than yours. In any case, you will come to expand your horizons. You will come to learn things. And you will start seeing people who belong to other religions in a different way.

Now, if you consider yourself to be a disbeliever, an atheist or an agnostic, I would also urge you to study the religions of the world. Not in order to find a religion to believe in — the purpose is not to believe. The purpose is to learn, to understand, to grow, to develop as a human being. And as I said earlier, most religions contain a lot of profound insights that you can learn from and which can guide you towards a much more beautiful life.

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