Religion

What greater impediment to our spiritual growth than the institutional church and its reverence for authority and stultifying dogmas? Religion transforms the flowering of humanity into a pathology. It demonizes our natural curiosity as wayward and heretical. It represses human sexuality into perversion and pornography. It censors our dreams and creative aspirations as blasphemy.

With its indoctrination of certitude, religion quashes open inquiry. With its static absolutes, religion neutralizes critical thinking.

Religion fills each generation with the poisonous doctrine that it is born evil, and it teaches that unless we redeem ourselves through unwavering compliance to the patriarch stand-ins for a fictional deity, we will be punished by torture for eternity.

Religion degrades and shackles the spirit in the name of saving it. It replaces community with dominion, science with superstition, philosophy with scripture, and art with rules. It redefines morality as conformity to authority. It would have us live ever prostrate before goblins it plants in the mind.

~ Jeff Mincey