I’ve held various religious views throughout my lifetime — some positive, some negative.  I’ve done the entire gamut from loving religion to hating it with a passion.

As I’ve gotten older, and perhaps a touch wiser, I’ve taken on a more middle-of-the-road attitude toward it.  I support people’s right to explore and subscribe to whatever religious beliefs give them a better understanding of their lives and the world they live in.  Because let’s face it, this is one crazy world and not too many of us can honestly claim to truly understand much of it.

I believe, however, that throughout the centuries, most of the major religions of the world have become corrupted for political and other evil purposes.  And these days it’s hard to figure out what most religions originally stood for and what wisdom they originally had to share with the world.  I do believe that there is a lot of truth hidden in religion, but that’s the problem — it’s often hidden.

But I know there must be truth in it, because if there wasn’t then why all the passion about it?  Why all the wars fought in the name of religion?  Why all the hate directed against religious groups?  Why all the effort to squash out religion in all parts of the world?  If religion was just a bunch of meaningless words written down in ancient books, with no wisdom and no truth to them, why would anyone care?

In order for so much effort and so many resources to be continuously dedicated to fighting something like religion, there must be something there that the people who fight it fear.  It takes fear to fight something.  A brave man or woman doesn’t need to fight, and rarely does.

So why do some people fear certain bodies of knowledge?  Whether this knowledge is true or false is beside the point.  If it’s fought, it’s feared.  So what are they afraid of?  Are they afraid they might find some truth in it?

Don’t kid yourself with the dogma you were likely taught in school.  Science contradicts itself just as much as religion contradicts itself.  Any competent statistician will tell you that evolution is impossible.  A biochemical engineer would likely agree, because she knows the complexity of even the most basic chemical elements required to create and support life, and the chances of those elements being created by chance and then combining in even more complex combinations is so improbable that it really takes a lot of blind faith to believe in evolution being caused solely by chance without a higher power guiding it.

The various branches of science are at odds with each other — there is no agreement between them on what is truth and what is not.  And there is no conclusive proof that religions are wrong in their view of the world, nor is there any concrete knowledge about what created the universe and what existed before the universe.  So how can we rule out religion as a source of truth when it has never been competently tested and disproven?

Whether you put your faith in science or in religion, you’re in the same boat as the next guy.  Until we know all the answers to this universe, I think it’s very arrogant for anyone to claim an entire body of knowledge is completely false — especially if they have no conclusive proof to support that claim.

So let’s be more tolerant of each other in the search for truth and knowledge of this universe that we live in.  There’s nothing to be gained by hating each other based on our views of the world.  Hating someone for their religious views is really no different than hating someone for being a believer in something like Physics.

You can argue that religion deserves to be hated because it has brought so much evil into the world in terms of wars and hatred and intolerance.  But look what science has brought us — weapons of mass destruction, efficient killing machines, mechanation of the world, loss of individuality and the human soul, etc.  Is that any better than the evils we attribute to religion?

We all have the ability to eventually discover the truth about ourselves and that of this universe if we continue the search for truth and keep an open mind to all possible explanations and philosophies offered.  If we can conclusively disprove something, then great.  Throw it away and move on to the next thing.  But don’t assume that because you don’t understand how something can be that it’s the same thing as disproving it.  Who would have believed several decades ago that things like rockets and microchips and genetic engineering were possible?  These were all just as easily “disproven” as myths back then as religion sometimes is today.  But that’s bad science and it will never lead to any real truth.

So I think it behooves us all to be a little more tolerant of each other and to keep making forward progress in the search for truth with an unbiased and open-minded approach.  The truth may ultimately be found in science, or it may be ultimately found in religion — or some combination of the two.  But wherever it’s found, the path to it needs to be an honest and tolerant path based on sound principles and valid methods of exploration — not hatred and prejudice.