What I Wish I Knew About Religion 10 Years Ago

I think it’s fairly safe to say that my greatest misjudgement in life (thus far) was religion.

I was a curious kid (and still am), so when I started going to Sunday school I would ask my Mom a ton of questions about church. In particular, I would ask about how things worked and if things in the bible really happened. You know, all the things that an inquisitive little kid asks when he’s trying to make sense of the world.

Discussions around questions like “where is heaven” never really satisfied me.

I have a natural rebellious tendency, so I don’t take “that’s just the way it is” very well. Pair that with the confirmation bias of an unself-aware teenager and you can imagine why I thought religion was silly. It was being jammed down my throat and I was looking for any reason to spit it back up.

I was measuring religion based on perfection and truth. In my mind, I couldn’t trust the church with all of the big questions I had about life if it was lying to me about Moses parting the Red Sea. If you have a friend that’s constantly feeding you lies, how are you supposed to trust them with life’s most important questions?

Naturally, I couldn’t. I couldn’t rationalize it, so I couldn’t accept it. It just seemed preposterous to me.

I just didn’t understand. I didn’t understand that trying to rationalize fables and tales from faraway lands wasn’t a good approach. It wasn’t the right measuring stick.

Measuring religion based on truth isn’t useful.

Say everything in the bible is, or isn’t, completely true. So what? Wouldn’t the wisdom in the book of Genesis be just as salient either way? What does it matter?

Regardless of the answer, religion, though it has been the cause of much conflict, has been the moral fabric holding societies together for tens of thousands of years.

Is it really fair to dismiss all of that because they fudged it a bit? If you were eating as many mushrooms as they were, let’s be honest, you’d have done the same.

So now I don’t measure religion based on truth. I measure it based on utility. Doing so is more, well… useful.