Most of us have been disillusioned with our religion or religion in general. Many of us have actually been angry with God. Then, eventually, we’d “repent” and reconcile with our faith. Why do we have so much trouble with our religions? Because we have long outgrown them.

If you are capable, look up the beginnings of religion. You’re on the net right now, open another window and look it up. You’ll find that religion served a very essential function for thousands of years. It helped us deal with the terrible conditions of life during mankind’s infancy. Primitive man lived a very short life. He was always hungry, often frightened, and uncertain whether he would live to see the next day. To cope, he invented religion.

Man created God in his own image. While there have been many gods, they all share a common trait: a capricious temperament and the unrelenting punishment primitive man saw in nature. The many gods of the Hebrews, Hashem, Yahweh, Elohim, Jehova, all were quite terrible rulers of man. He was always demanding sacrifices, always wanting praise and to be shown devotion he seemed as petty as his creations. The god of the Christians apparently wasn’t as all-powerful as the god of the Jews as he needed to have a representative on Earth to help him out. The Muslim god, even with the one name, Allah, shows ninety-nine different aspects in the Koran. Allah seems to be a very complex invention.

And why is it, do you suppose, that our gods have always been male? God is supposed to be an omnipotent being and, more to the point, singular. God is, was, and always will be. God has no partner. Without a need for reproduction, there can be no sex. There can be no male or female. God, by definition, then must be gender neutral. With no disrespect intended, God is an it. The ruling gender when God was invented was male. Therefore, God is male. He even appears to have a race. The race, of course, depends on who invented that particular God.

Mankind has outgrown religion, as we now know it. Superstition and magic is the province of the illiterate and the stupidly stubborn. It is, also, the tool of the ruling class. It is much easier to keep the people in line when they believe they will be rewarded in the next life.

Religion is not based on reality. It cannot be proven and therefore is called faith. We all need faith. However, we can no longer put our faith in religion. We must put our faith in mankind itself. Mankind is its own salvation.

It is very, very difficult to accept the fact that, as far as can be proven, when we die that’s it. Our very being, all that we are and have ever been, very well may be just a collection of biochemically-induced electricity. When we die, the switch is flipped off and it’s all over. Forever. 

Personally, I cling to the hope that there is an afterlife. Matter and energy cannot be destroyed. Therefore, our electrical selves may indeed exist after we discorporate. Nevertheless, that is no reason to be satisfied with waiting to find out what happens next. There very well may be nothing next. Since there is no proof either way, the point of an afterlife is moot. It does us no good whatsoever to waste our energy living for the next life.

All religions speak of a heaven of one sort or another. Usually, if we’ve behaved properly in this life, we then move on to a wonderful place to spend eternity. Most commonly, heaven is described not so much as what it has as what it doesn’t have. No hunger, no fear, no hate, no crime, no jealously or covetousness, no physical displeasure at all. Heaven has the absence of all of those things that can make this life completely miserable. 

Now here’s a fact that I very much hope does not startle you: the only heaven any of us will ever see is the one that we make. Even if there were an afterlife, it could not possibly be anything like this life. We wouldn’t have corporeal bodies, therefore there could not possibly exist hunger, cold, thirst, lust and no reason for hate, fear, loneliness, crime of any type. We most certainly wouldn’t find existing like that very pleasurable at all. If anything, we’d be bored to insanity. I submit that at this stage in humanity’s evolution, we cannot comprehend heaven.