How to choose a religion.
Let’s start with a proposition we all know to be true:
“All Gods are false Gods — except the ones our parents taught us as children.”
So the easiest way to choose a religion is just to adopt with blind faith what we were taught as children. And that’s the method used by 99% of religious adherents. They don’t choose a religion, they inherit one. (And that may be a good thing, as it fits their genetic predisposition.)
But for any of us who are still searching, here is an alternative approach.
As an ancient Chinese proverb reminds us, “It does not matter if the cat is a white cat, or if the cat is a black cat. If the cat catches mice,it is a good cat.” I feel the same way about religion.
If a religion fosters
love, empathy,
kindness, compassion,
generosity, forgiveness,
honesty, integrity,
humility and responsibility,
it is a good religion.
Of course, each religion has its own unique origin story and its own God or Gods. It may be that all those Gods are actually the same God. Or it may be that all but one of those Gods are False Gods. It doesn’t matter. I treat them all the same, as individual, unique mythologies supporting a common morality.
These origin stories are mostly just the best guesses about how the world came into being made by groups of illiterate people who were trying to figure things out before writing, before printing, before the scientific method, based on stories told by their even more primitive ancestors. Some of those stories are pretty fantastic, but so what. I don’t care if it is a black cat or a white cat.
So what is a bad religion? A bad religion is any religion that teaches its followers that they have the right, even the duty, to coerce others to adopt their origin story— by force if necessary. This approach puts belief in the truth of a particular origin story above adherence to the moral principles essential to any good religion. Better to put morality above mythology.
If your chosen religion requires you to hate someone, you have chosen the wrong religion.