#Repost: Religion: Good, Bad, Ugly.

While struggling on what to write this morning, largely because I am physically drained from the activities of the past week (work, parties, work, etc), I suddenly got a brainwave to do a repost of one of my past posts, especially for the newbies on my blog. 

I randomly selected a post from last year and shockingly, not much has changed since I wrote it. 

Enjoy this oldie but goodie post.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It's heartbreaking that this week is starting on such a sour note with the hostage situation in Australia. I only heard about it on my way to work earlier today and coincidentally, my hubby and I were just discussing the negative sides of religion when I read the news on my Twitter timeline. I find it really disgraceful and heartbreaking that fanatics have taken over religion around the world and their attitudes and actions are a far reflection of the God they claim to serve.

I look around me and see all the atrocities people get up to in the name of religion and I just wonder how we would all end up in a few years time if these things are not checked. It isn't religion that causes a man to strap a bomb on a young girl's chest and set it off in the middle of a busy market, it is madness under the guise of religion. This madness and cloak of disguise is what would make a man hold innocent people going about their duties, hostage. I cannot even begin to imagine the trauma those hostages are being subjected to.

This incident also makes me ponder and worry about the fate of the Chibok girls who were kidnapped over six months ago by the Boko Haram terrorists and of course the numerous other people they have kidnapped and held hostage since then. As you watch things unfold in Sydney, spare a thought and a prayer for those people and their plight. Unfortunately for them, there are no SWAT teams in place on a rescue mission surrounding where they are being held captive, our president is not on TV assuring the rest of us and them of the fight for their freedom. Life, in Nigeria, is going on as usual. 

I am a Christian and I love God and all but I'm appalled how the way some people go about religion entirely forgetting that the core of Christianity (and Islam?) is love. Just the other day, there was the news about a woman who was charged to court for biting her neighbour's scrotum. Yes, you read that right! Apparently, Mr. neighbour had gone to his church to give a testimony about how God fought his battles for him by causing the poor woman's child to die because of the evil intentions she had towards him! Who. Does. That. Please??? Unless he caught her red-handed sticking pins and needles into an effigy of him and burning it up, while chanting evil stuff with his name on her lips, I would say he had that bite coming. If I were her lawyer, I would defend her by saying she suffered temporary insanity due to her intense grief and I will convince the judge of the madness that brought about the evil utterances of the neighbour. 

I also heard about a pastor who was preaching and saying that the reason why the sole survivor of a plane crash made it out alive was because she was a faithful tither!!! Well, pardon the rest of the world for letting her fly with mere unfaithful sinners. -_- I mean, it just gets worse and worse and if we keep allowing ourselves to be brainwashed into thinking like robotic morons simply because someone claims they have a superior calling to ours, then this can only end one way.

It's easy to rant and rave about these Christian and Muslim extremists but how different are we from them? The fact that some of us aren't physically beheading others or damaging their psyches physically doesn't take away the fact that we do so to them verbally and emotionally. You see a person in dire need but hurry past them rather than stop to help and assist. You don't genuinely love your neighbours as yourself talk less of being their keepers. You gossip, backbite, backstab, covet, envy, etc etc, yielding results that are emotional rather than physical. Same difference, I tell you.

Religion, like most things, has shown it has good, bad, and ugly sides. I only hope that the ugly sides that keep rearing it's head in the form of modern day terrorism will be curbed before it consumes us all. I pray that we will #BringBackOurGirls and the numerous others under siege, helplessly. I pray suicide bombings and the other atrocities being carried out by terrorists wold stop ASAP. I pray the hostage situation ends well for the hostages in Sydney.