Religion as a mass control method

"Unless I watch you disappear in to the ground

My one mistake was that I never let you down,

So I'll waste my time

And I'll burn my mind,

I'm Miss Nothing,

I miss everything."

"Miss Nothing" - The Pretty Reckless

Experience leads us to the conclusion that every human being requires, by nature, a system of beliefs, which can range from the firm conviction that there's a spaghetti monster watching over Mankind to the common conception that the existence of the world around us is an absolute truth. Beliefs, though, have a wide variety of origins and natures: some come from philosophic statements from known authors, some are taken as a trait Humanity has had since its very origin, some require certain rites and actions such as praying and some don't imply any specific action taken.

Love it or love it twice, but love it either way.

Once the prior has been stated, it's important to stress on those belief systems that require us to take action in certain ways. In our day and age, we're witnesses of the existence of many generalized belief systems known as religions that share the trait of morally forcing their believers to do so. That obligation, however, doesn't assume the believer will do it for the sake of religious devotion: no, in most* cases, in order to make sure believers follow the established path, religions threaten them with elements like eternal punishment after death or dishonour.

And, once again, it's important to highlight one detail of what has been exposed: in most cases, believers follow the rites and paths of their religion with the sole purpose of avoiding a negative consequence of not doing so; in other words, they do so because they fear what might happen otherwise.

Though this trait major religions of our world share has a very important outcome, it's not what I wish to focus on. On of the things that catch my eye the most is the societal imposition of the beliefs that conform a religion (or, said in a better way, of the fear leading to a certain religion). In an environment where a concrete religion is present (call it a family, a social group, or a intellectually-third-world country), individuals who are yet to form an established opinion and, therefore, are still predisposed to acquire a belief system, are unconsciously forced to, as I call it, "breathe what's in the air," or, in other words, adopt the predominant religion in the context.

Religions are not innate ideas, they are passed from individual to individual in a variety of ways, majorly involving some kind of social imposition or assumption. A pattern that comes up as incredibly useful to exemplify this is the case for sects, where, for the sake of acceptance in a social group, an often extremely delusional belief system, mostly created in recent times with the conscious objective of manipulating a group of individuals, is adopted, often leading to actions such as the transferring of material possessions to the manipulator or even collective suicide rites.

See? Jesus looks the other way.

Leaving that behind, another one of the traits most religions share which captures my attention is the value those religions tend to assign to the believers' actions, whether they are strictly religious acts or not. Most religions assume the objective of our physical life is pleasing a higher entity in order to gain salvation and avoid the punishment I mentioned before. This implies the demotion of Humanity from feeling entities, able to decide what to do and to do it for the sake of themselves and others, to slaves of a deity with no other worth than making God get a boner (sorry for that, I might be getting a bit angry here.)

And, yet again, this leads me to something I've already spoken about: in this case, Humanism. Believing the people around are worthy of love and believing in most religions are not compatible.

The list could go on and on. I know this doesn't do the job as a proof that religions are wrong, but it does prove they are the first thing to get rid of when trying to improve one's own life.

*Whenever the word "most" is used with religions, it has the sole objective of excluding exceptions with almost no representation in our western world like Buddhism. Major religions (Christianity, Islam and Jewism) fall to the definition used to write this post.