In honor of the recently-aborted cat fight about religion going on around these parts, I figured I'd jump on the bandwagon and sound off myself.

Yesterday in the mail, our apartment received a package in the mail addressed to "current resident" which consisted of propaganda trying to convert us to some form of Christianity by becoming "born again". Along with some booklets, there is a letter explaining why we should take the time to read over this, and it contains the following statement:

In our society today, the popular trend is for everyone to believe what they want to, and each of us is expected to tolerate each other. That sounds wonderful and freeing. However, it is a deception that will end in tragedy.

Wow. So religions like Judaism, Buddhism, and others that have been around for thousands of years are just "trends", and we should be intolerant and scornful of anyone who does not believe what it says in a pamphlet that was addressed to "current resident" and sent bulk rate mail?

Having no choice, since the letter told me so, I opened up the next item in the package which was a booklet about how to become born again. All of the chapters tell you what to do (including the openly-pretentious "What Should You Believe?" section), but by far the most amusing is the one about "speaking in tongues". Here is an exerpt:

You probably noticed that other people began to speak in "tongues" or "other tongues" as they were baptized in the Holy Spirit. ... To speak in tongues, open your mouth and as the Spirit gives you utterance, speak forth what you hear coming up out of your inner man. This will not come out of your head. Remember, your mind does not understand this. ... You will hear or sense syllables, phrases, groanings, or utterances that are unusual or foreign sounding to you. ... Do not speak in tongues around people who do not understand.

Apparently, it is not enough to be a good person to be a Christian, you also must be intolerant of others and walk around mumbling incoherently. And, of course, you must spread the word to others, because what good is religion if you can't bully everyone else into believing the same thing you do? I wouldn't go as far as to say that "all organized religion is absurd", since a lot of the common tenets of major religion like the Golden Rule of treating your neighbors as you would like to be treated are things that I believe are important to society, but my major beef with most of them is their insistence that everyone must believe the exact same thing and if they don't they are going to hell or being reincarnated as a dead opossum or something.

Any religion that "advertises" (through those annoying billboards on the way to the airport, expensive mass mailings, WWJD bracelets, fish magnets on cars, "Do You Agree with Ramon?" campaigns, and worst of all "Christian Rock" music) must have a massive inferiority complex. Isn't it funny how there are no "Jewish Rock" radio stations, no Hindu services broadcast on Channel 11, and no billboards on the side of the road telling me to pray towards Mecca? Believe what you want to believe, but try not to be so pretentious that you think that only you know the ultimate truth of the universe, especially when up until very recently you "knew" that the Earth is flat.