Salvation, Damnation, Tomayto, Tomahto

Religion is the art of turning fear and superstition into the commodity of Jesus Christ in order to bottle God like Coca Cola. This divinely patented process ensures that the more you drink the blood of your savior, the thirstier you will surely become.

 All those who peddle such sugary spirits benefit greatly from God's absence, of course, as his presence would instantly satisfy the deep desire that religion both preys upon and helps to exacerbate. And as a result, there would be no need for religion anymore, and overnight, $4.8 trillion would simply vanish from the U.S. economy, according to a Georgetown Study completed in 2016.

The reason God's impromptu return would be so ruinous for religion is because it is only with the desire for God that people can be controlled. Having God, on the other hand, would be like trying to control a lion with the promise of a gyro sandwich after it had already gorged itself on a gazelle. As Slavoj Zizek has pointed out, satisfying a desire completely only serves to destroy the desire itself, and if God were in the world, religion would be out of business. Like cancer, the money to be made is not in finding a cure, but in prolonging the treatment.

What is the spiritual cancer that Christianity seeks to treat in humanity? For most people, it's that boney faced fellow we call death. Religion provides humanity with an antidote to its mortality, in other words, although it is one that is purely emotional and psychological, not physical. Eternal life in paradise can be purchased for the price of filling the collection plate every Sunday, and emptying our heads of any suspicions of those who make a fortune selling people the very kind of spiritual snake oil they want. And by doing so, religion helps to anesthetize our anxiety over our own terminal condition - thanks be to "God."

Believe, so the story goes, and you will rise again from the dead and never die, the very thing the serpent promised Adam and Eve they would receive for "eating of the fruit of the vine," in addition to providing them with "a divine knowledge of all good and evil," which you'll be further inspired to share with others in order (because God basically commands that you share it with others, especially those who wish to hear about least of all), in order to save one's own everlasting soul from the eternal fires of hell.

This idea - called "Christianity" - does not only give people a God and a messiah they can believe in, it actually promises to turn people into gods and messiahs, which among all of the empires that existed prior to Rome was a privilege generally reserved for the upper classes, with the other 99.9% of God's children being treated like Rosa Parks, only the back of the bus is either a cemetery or Hades.  This all changed with St. Paul, of course, who became the Bill Gates of "salvation" software, followed by Martin Luther, who became the Steve Jobs of of that same software.

By extending eternal life to everyone, anyone who believes in God has a chance of becoming "their own personal Jesus," in a sense, because Christianity not only promises to all who "believe" in Jesus that they will one day eventually become just as immortal as Jesus- much like the gods of Egypt, Greece, Rome, and L. Ron Hubbard's, Dianetics - but also assures the "saved" that anyone who dares to point out that simply "believing" such a thing doesn't make it true will surely face God's eternal wrath for having done so.
     

Religion also allows the believer to explain away all forms of suffering in the world, no matter how excruciating, as ultimately serving the will of God, even if they don't exactly know how. This, for example, leads us to the conclusion that it is humane to put a dying animal to sleep, but inhumane to ever think of extending such mercy to human beings. From wars to burning witches, to the countless diseases and cancers we have created thanks to our use of chemicals in anything and everything, all of the suffering suffered throughout history - both physical and psychological - have all in some way potentially "served" the Christian God's "divine plan," one that requires the entire world to pray that God will change it that plan - even though He never has. And all of this is intelligently designed, much like the brutal murder of Jesus himself, to save humanity from itself, by keeping humanity in a permanent spiritual state of PTSD, by reminding us of the brutal torture and murder of Christ  that we are all guilty of, by drinking wine-flavored-blood every Sunday.

In other words, for Christians, we can either pick up the cross of "faith" like Jesus did, and prove ourselves worthy of Christ by allowing ourselves to be crucified for our religious beliefs, no matter how contrary to science and reason those beliefs may be, or we can refuse to do so and, by so refusing, pick up the cross of critical thinking, skepticism, and doubt, in a world awash in religious beliefs, and likewise be crucified - by religious "believers" of every stripe and degree. Hence, we can either die for religion, or be killed by it. In the immortal words of the divine serial killer from the movie Saw, "make your choice."  Either way, we are damned if we do and damned if we don't, and the only difference between salvation and damnation is simply the difference between a tomayto and a tomahto.