Is Religion Something to Pursue?

One of the arguments that is used to discredit religion is whether or not it makes sense in a modern world. The question is whether or not a religion based on the philosophies that are over two thousand years old have any applicability to our lives today. With all that is said and done, it does seem weird that we place a large amount of faith in a book written by forty different authors over the better part of a millennia that mentions how to beat your slave and rape your women. Nonetheless, there are a lot of good reasons.

I’m not going to argue the scientific validity or cherry-picking verses here; those are lectures for another day. What I am going to point out is that The Bible does have a lot of great advice if you bother paying attention; there’s a reason it has lasted so long. There is a lot to be gained by looking at it every so often, and bothering to even read it. We need to remember that it’s a metaphorical construct and that some of its tenets may not have gone by the wayside; this is not cherry-picking so much as it recognizing that The Bible is the Living Word. It is meant to change, just like a living being, to adapt to new challenges in order to overcome them.

Beyond The Bible, there are other advantages to being part of a church. Church-goers tend to live longer (a full five years longer), and there is always the added advantage of resources. One person focused on a problem can sometimes do miracles; imagine what can happen when you get an entire group of people focused on that problem. People tend to pull together in a crisis; nothing makes a group forget its internal bickering like an outside attack. People get organized when there is a call, be it someone needing help, a natural crisis, or just to see if they can make life easier for each other.

This is not to say that some groups do wrong in groups; the WBC is probably the best example of that. This is the problem of groups; the same group that forms a bucket brigade without effort to save a building from fire can form a lynch mob just as easily. That is something that we need to be beware of when we organize; we need to form groups intelligently and with wisdom rather than merely passion. This is not to say that we should remove passion from the equation, but that it should serve our will, not our will serving our passion. We are at our best when we are challenged and we attack that challenge intelligently rather than merely passionately.

We also need a common framework for communication. Any good text does that; it gives the group a means to quickly understand each other. By using The Bible, we have a way to quickly communicate information using metaphors when our other words fail us, giving us another way to communicate. We can also show that some problems, such as rebellious youth or husbands and wives seeming to be in different world, are universal and age-old, which is an odd comfort; in an ever-changing world, it is nice to know that some things never really change. That it allows communication between believers of the past and modern as well as between groups of modern believers makes it a powerful book.

So does religion in a modern world make sense? As long as it is a force for good, yes; nothing is more powerful than a group sharing the same motivation with a common ground. Yes, this also means that it can be a formidable power for evil, and that needs to be avoided at all costs. But the benefits ultimately outweigh the bad, and that is something that needs to be considered. We as believers must constantly ask ourselves if which we are serving, not as doubt but to ensure that our faith isn’t misguided. As long as we are not afraid to ask if we are doing the right thing, we should be okay. We just need to less fearful of asking the wrong question than doing the right thing.