by Joe Palvado

Created on: June 03, 2009   Last Updated: February 19, 2011

Religion is essential. Should there be no religion, there would be no life.

"Whatever is opposed to life itself, such as any type of murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia or willful self-destruction, whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, torments inflicted on body or mind, attempts to coerce the will itself; whatever insults human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution, the selling of women and children; as well as disgraceful working conditions, where men are treated as mere tools for profit, rather than as free and responsible persons; all these things and others of their like are infamies indeed. They poison human society, but they do more harm to those who practice them than those who suffer from the injury. Moreover, they are supreme dishonor to the Creator”.The quotation comes from the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes), a doctrine promulgated by His Holiness, Pope Paul VI.

Should there be no religion, there would be no authentic love. Where there is no love, there is only oppression, suffering and enslavement. Religion, when lived appropriately, strives to benefit another, to love, to respect, to cherish the other. The antitheses of these charisms is readily recognizable in the nihilist, the cynic, the fanatic and the pragmatist who sees religion as myopia and whose own intractable beliefs are founded upon laws of cause and effect or action and reaction; the purely sensual. Religion believes in the inherent goodness and unknowable intelligence of God. Religion believes in a humanity God fashioned in His own image and likeness. The religious acknowledge that understanding isn’t always essential, that belief is not a synonym for understanding and that the metaphysical aspects of life are not less real simply because understanding certain mysteries lay beyond human comprehension. Religion believes and seeks to understand, understanding that “facts” oftentimes exist in realms of the incomprehensible.

Religion has many detractors. Religion also has a colorful and sordid history-not unlike the history and culture of any other group, class, culture, society or generation of human beings. Nonetheless, religion must have a place within the milieu of human striving. To the extent that religion is repressed by despotic governments and the religious are ostracized, persecuted or marginalized by one culture or another, the beneficial effects of a religious people will be lost and the greatest losers of all will be the very people who removed the religious from their midst.

Learn more about this author, Joe Palvado.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.