Religion is an impulse to explain. A natural impulse that everyone has and everyone grapples with. It's an impulse that, sadly and ironically, has been exploited to convince people to take actions that defy and demean that impulse. The exploiters are the ruling elite of nearly every society, in every era, and ours is no exception. It's not hard to understand the false sense of comfort and security of faith that religion provides. A lot of us have been through it and can understand how hard it can be to shake the grip of dogma.

Religious dogma, which is a set of rules, is a tool used by people in power to keep other people powerless, and to coerce them into serving the interests of the powerful. History is flooded with examples of religion used to defend and promote most of humanity's dumbest moves. Like genocide: the holocaust and the annihilation of the worlds' indigenous populations. Like war: from the beginnings of 'civilization' to the Gulf War and beyond. Like prejudice: the continued subjugation of women in all the major religions. Like poverty: as a tool of capitalism, religion has taught the poor to accept injustice.

Probably the worst effect religion has on us is its' ability to create divisions so remarkably deep that people will kill for them. Scratch at any major conflict in the world today and just beneath the skin of diplomacy and territorial demands you will find a fundamentalist, bloodthirsty form of one or more organized religion. Many 'progressive' people involved in religions believe they can work within their religious institutions to change them for the better. It's an understandable desire- we all work within institutions to some extent, but it's kinda dumb in the same way that the Catholic Church's motivation for wanting to feed the hungry is kinda dumb: their writings and dogma tell them to. Shouldn't they be motivated by simply knowing that feeding the hungry is the right thing to do?

People indoctrinated in religions, seem to believe that a moral code cannot exist outside of their institution. It can and it does. We have the ability to do the right thing without the rhetoric of dogmas, the threat of hierarchies or the fear of some some old coot in a beard firing a lightning bolt at our sinful, hairy, zitty little asses. The saddest thing about religion is what is lost. Religion, or more accurately, I suppose, the appropriators and exploiters of religion, have taken our purest impulses of solidarity, compassion, celebration of the wonder and mystery of our lives, and turned them against us.