No

by Lindsay Shutting

Created on: November 27, 2010

Is religion only for those who can’t accept responsibility for their own faults and failings? Let’s define religion. It’s fair to say that religion is an establishment in which a belief in a divine power is expressed. With that said, is acknowledging a higher power the same as refusing to accept responsibility for one’s own faults and failings? No. It’s not.

Discussing personal accountability in regards to each faith-structure on the planet is certainly beyond the scope of this article. However, generally, unless one’s faith falls in under a religion that claims humans have no free will or no consequential reproof, we are very much, in fact, accountable for our own actions. In other words, if you and I are just puppets with no free thought or self-motivated action then how can we blame ourselves for bad decisions?

Now we must explore the consequences of not accepting responsibility for our own actions, failures, and faults. Failure can be subjective. For example, a long time ago I tried to get this guy to really believe in this cause I was promoting. I was convinced that if I just talked him into coming to a meeting then he would be hooked. He did come to a meeting, but he did not become hooked.

So was I successful or did I fail? I was successful in getting him to come to a meeting. But I couldn’t force his vote. This demonstrates how failures are sometimes out of our control. I might have presented him the best case possible—or the worst. There is no proof that my argument was the only factor in his decision. So what did I do? I analyzed the entire situation to find what I could have done better and in turn strengthened my argument for the next time.

So once again, did I fail or succeed? What if I had gained him in the cause and my overconfidence from winning his vote caused me to lose the next person’s vote I approached? So you can see what I mean when I say that failure is subjective. 

With all that said, can a person better themselves when they refuse to see what needs to be better? They can’t. Growth cannot happen. This is a result of refusal to acknowledge personal fault. And to say that religion promotes arrested growth is false when in fact, religion, by definition, is an institution by which a higher power is simply acknowledged.

That’s not to say that there aren’t belief systems in the world that promote such thinking. However, for all of our sakes I would hope people seek out religion to grow rather than regress to an egocentric stage of moral, psychological, social, and emotional development.

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