Religion is Trash
by Sherry Kirton
May 1999

Garbage is garbage.

Religion is an organized attempt to get to God. It doesn’t work. None of us has what it takes to get to God. We aren’t robots who accept Him without question. He didn’t want robots. He wants friends, and friends don’t always choose the same movies you do.

You are right. Religion causes people to fight and kill and be just ugly.

God sent Jesus to tell us this. Remember how Jesus was always ticking off the “Pharisees” who just happened to be “The Religious leaders”. They didn’t get it. Instead, Jesus picked out some friends to truely get to know him. He picked a group that didn’t make much sense to me. A hated tax collecter- an agent of the IRS, a couple of fishermen- smelly guys who have fish guts under their nails and aren’t very smart because they spent school time fishing, and they really hated tax collectors. No religious leaders there.

After He was murdered by the religious leaders He came back to His friends who had deserted Him. He loved them anyway, and told them to tell others the same. After a while those who loved Jesus were a huge group and they were threatening to the Roman government, just like today. A lot of them got murdered too, for fun and used as human torches for garden parties. But, the Love shown to them by Jesus was so strong and powerful, that their numbers only grew.

Hundreds of years later the friends of Jesus were scattered and someone decided to gather all of the info about Him that they could find and soon people got confused. They thought that they needed to get to Him instead of letting Him have them. That’s when it became religion; no longer was the entire group who called themselves His friends just that. Instead, they tried to do things their way, not His.

Whenever that happens, we are doing things in our power and not His. This makes us all nervous and so we start trying to push others around too. We forget that He died so that we could live. We forget that He also asked us to do the same, die to our own needs so that others could see the same truth in us. We forget to be like Him and let Him make us that way. We forget.

Then it becomes religion. And one religion will always attack another when it feels threatened. No one wants to become a human torch for any reason, so a threatened religion will fight back.

You aren’t stupid. You caught it right on the head. People can’t act right all on their own. But, with God’s love, and God’s power, we can give each other the room to learn that God loves each of us, even murderers. Hard to swallow, but it is true.

God said, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and strength”. Then, “Love your neighbour as yourself.” That means I have to love everyone one, including my enemies. That means I need more of Him in order to love people, cause I don’t want to love most of the time.

You aren’t stupid. Trash religion. Ask God to help you love like Him. Only His friends can do that.