Let me just begin by saying that this isn’t an attack on Christianity, or any religion for that matter. This also isn’t an attack on ignorance. It’s not even an attack on apathy. This is an attack on faith, well, more notably, blind faith. Faith is defined as believing in something, trusting in something, even when there’s no evidence to back up what it is that you believe in, but when does the line between being a follower, and being a mindless sheep, stop?

I’ve known Hindus, Jews, Christians, I’ve even talked to a woman who grew up in a backwoods, Muslim town in the Middle-East, and they’re all wonderful, educated individuals that you’d want to be friends with. However, when the topic of religion comes up, they explode! The thing is, people can get so caught up in trivialities, such as Republican-Democrat, the material that Christ was made out of, and birth and caste, that they really miss the point of religion.

When Pius V became the Pope, he slaughtered thousands of Huguenots, Eastern Orthodox Christians, and other heretics. When Adolf Hitler became Fuhrer, he shipped off thousands of Communists, Homosexuals, Political dissidents, and Jews to be worked to death and then burned at Concentration Camps. And, more recently, when Osama Bin Laden started his jihad, he crashed a plane into the Twin Towers, and tried to do the same with the White House and the Pentagon. Many people might say, well, Pius V and Bin Laden were victims of their religions, which promote killing. But make no mistake, none of these people were driven by religion to do what they did, they used their religion as a mask to hide their real intentions, which was simply to kill people. Now, you might wonder, if they were really just trying to kill people, then why did anyone follow them? It’s because all the people that did follow these men really did believe that what they were doing was for good, and would ensure salvation, or Heaven, or prosperity, or whatever these men had promised them. For every man that said “NO! This is wrong!” there were a hundred more who said “Shut up! We’re in the right!” It’s happened thousands of times before, and sadly, it’ll probably happen a thousand times more.

Now you might be wondering, how could all those people continue to say that they were in the right and not see what horrors they were committing? Sure, the big, bad man promised them a magic pony an’ all, but come on! Well, the problem is that Blind Faith is more than just a belief, it’s a mindset. It requires people to see things in only one way. Those people couldn’t stop because they simply couldn’t see the error in what they were doing. See, if you only see a dime as a dime, you’ll never realize that it also makes an excellent screwdriver, and if you only see some one as having a different belief as yours, then you’ll never realize that aside from that, they’re really nice people.

Now, am I saying that you should become an atheist? That you should become an anarchist? That you should never trust anyone ever again? No, now you’re simply going too far to the other side. Trust, faith, belief, it’s what bonds us human beings together, it’s what helps us cope with loss, it’s what makes us feel that there’s always hope. Continue your religion, continue your political party, continue loving the people you love. But just remember, whenever some one or something tells you to do something, something that might not be all that good, then it’s your duty as a human being to stand up and say “No, you’re wrong.” Maybe then, if everyone took a step back and thought about their actions, then people might get along quite a lot more than they do now. But then, who can say? We can only know if people really do it, right?