Whenever I hear or read someone, a Christian, say that we have to suffer in this life because if we suffer and still have faith, there’s a better life awaiting us. I know, like many of you, I too used to believe this nonsense but today, I just shake my head and ask the question, why? Why would a God that supposedly loves us have us go through so much travail in this life with a promise that if we pass the test, keeping our faith, we will be rewarded, later?

I cannot understand, and maybe I never did, how this God that loves us so much would have us go through so much in a world he created for us, another of his creations, and have to wade through starvation, disease, wars, and all of the depredations of this life in order to receive something better, after we die.

This is the person Christians call Father. Curious how any parent would allow their children to suffer so much for a promise of something in the future, but that’s exactly what Christianity offers.  What do Christians say about all of this?  We live in a fallen world, a world that has rejected God and he sent, and sacrificed his son, so that we would return to him.

Of course, it’s our choice whether to believe or not and we are expected to believe without seeing. We’re told it’s our free will whether to believe and receive the joys of paradise, or, if we choose not, suffer the ignominy of eternal torture. Heck of a choice there. Worship me or else. That’s the essence of religion.

All of this, over the years , is why I came to reject a belief in any god and that I found religion, in all of it’s forms, to be nothing more than a way to oppress people.