by Karen Greenberg

Created on: October 27, 2007   Last Updated: May 21, 2010

I believe that it is possible to be too religious. With that being said, I don't think that it is possible to love your God too much. Those two issues are completely different. Following a religion means stating a desire to follow a certain group of people and their views. Loving God is just that.

Within the past year I have left "the church". I left the church because I felt that religion was getting in the way with me discovering the true love and meaning that I was longing for. It started to seem like if I disagreed with even one person in the church I was wrong and didn't belong. I would go to bible study after bible study where the answers were given as a set "rule", not discussed. I don't believe that any religion has all the answers, and my personal opinion is that the Bible is a guide for opening certain ideas to exploration.

One thing that I have noticed about religion lately is the way that people display it rather than live it. For example, having a huge Christian fish or window decal with the name of a local church on the back of a car seems to be getting more and more popular in the area that I live. However, these are the same people that would cut off another driver in traffic faster than anyone else. I see girls walking down the sidewalk with Christian t-shirts on, yet they are so tight or ill-fitting that one cannot help but to notice the shape of the girl underneath. Sadly, in both of these instances, the person "on display" comes across as hypocritical. This apparent hypocrisy drives people away from the church, and in people that are new to faith it could drive them away from God in general.

Whatever God a person chooses to worship should be a personal choice. By following a religion people get sucked into worrying about what others around them think rather than worrying about pleasing the God they are claiming to be living their lives for. It is definitely possible to be too religious. Religion in itself is not bad. It does become bad, however, when people hide behind it in order to not think for themselves and live the lives they know they should be living.

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