Those who preach religion should understand it first

I am amazed at the number of people who still take religion literally. If you rely on religion to guide your behavior and never question it, you are living in an archaic delusion. God, Allah, whoever or whatever ... gave you a brain, so it seems obvious you ought to use it! If you profess to follow a specific religion, study it! Because if you don't, you are blindly walking through life and annoying the crap out of the rest of us. I am not just talking about Sunday school and whatever. Study the history of your religion. Actually READ and UNDERSTAND the Bible or Koran or whatever. Think about it! Who wrote it? When was it written? Yes, yes ... I know all about the postulations that God, Allah, whatever wrote these texts, but PLEASE! someone had to be actually holding the writing utensil. Don't you think maybe, just maybe, their own viewpoints biased by their culture, gender, time, etc., might possibly have had some influence on what they took down as God's or whoever's dictation? (Do you know what strands in the Bible are?)

Think about this too. Have you ever played that game where someone whispers something in the next person's ear and by the time it gets to the last person it is completely changed? Each translation, each painstaking hand-written copy of these texts (look up the date for printing presses) presented a chance for changes to be made. Now, let's talk about religious reformations and fundamentalist purifications followed up with political influences and manipulations; actually let's not.

I have actually heard more than one UA student (male of course) comment that women are inferior to men and quote parts of Genesis to back it up. Pleeaase! This stuff was written almost 2,000 years ago in an ignorant patriarchal society. Face it, religion is used to discriminate, promote war, justify hate and slavery, and for generations has kept entire segments of societies ignorant, poor, and submissive to political manipulation. Are you being used? How do you know? If you are a religious person and you cannot immediately relate actual examples to the aforementioned phenomenon, then you have no idea what you are basing your life on.

By Joy Abernathey (letter)
Arizona Daily Wildcat
February 20, 1997