Christians are wimps

Well, Christians and a bunch of other religious goobers. Basically any group that has to make arbitrary rules like "no sex until marriage", "no alcohol", "no dancing", or anything else that their deity has forbidden.

God doesn't want you to do X. OK. He tells you not to do it. But that's not enough: he says that if you do it, you'll suffer damnation. That's still not enough, so he makes his minions pound that concept into your head once a week, at least. Still, this is somehow not enough: people enforce laws that will punish you in this lifetime, in addition to God's punishment in the next life.

I'm not sure if this approach says more about the religion or the people following the religion. You claim that people must prove their faith to God by abstaining from X, and then you go ahead and make it entirely too easy. And yet people still do it, they still commit the "sin" of X. Does that mean that the ideas you're pushing are such garbage that no one in the right frame of mind would follow along without all of this intervention?

If you want people to really prove their faith in God, toss a Christian teenager into the Playboy mansion: if he manages to stay "pure" and convert more than half the guests to Christianity, he gets into Heaven. That should be fun. And it will really test his faith.

This is related to my previous blog entry, specifically, the part where I say:

If the thought of eternal damnation isn't keeping young Romeo and Juliet from knocking boots, the threat of cancer in 40 years is a very weak scare-tactic.

Seriously, if after all the prodding and lecturing, day in and day out, a person is still willing to be damned for all eternity, maybe you're trying to pound a square peg into a triangular hole. It'll go in, sure, but is that what you really want?

This applies to a vast variety of religions, but goes double for those groups that have taken it to the next level: we're really up the creek when the idea moves away from Sunday-morning preaching into nation-wide law. Is your religion so illogical and completely against human nature that you have to put your arbitrary rules into law? I consider this final move the ultimate failure of religion: when God depends on laws of man to uphold His rules, what kind of followers are you left with? Man's reason for following the path set by God is no longer faith, but fear of earthly punishment.

Do you really need millions upon millions of brainwashed "individuals" to be a part of your religion? Does that make your life seem less-wasted? Does it vindicate your choice in religion?

PS: Was it really a choice? Or was it the fact that your parents/family/friends subscribe to the same delusions?