1. Your body belongs to you. You can do whatever you want with it and not what some guy in a confessional or behind a pulpit decides.
2. You can eat and drink whatever you like whenever you like without feeling the need to consult some incomprehensible ancient book by people who have been dead forever.
3. There is no need to wake up early on Sunday and schlep to a building where equally sleepy and annoyed people engage in weird rituals together.
4. The idea that there can be anything wrong or shameful about sexual pleasure sounds bizarre.
5. Activities like enjoying food, procrastinating and expressing emotions freely do not lead to intense feelings of guilt.
6. In your romantic relationships, you consult your desires, not dusty tomes.
7. You save a lot of money because nobody hits you up for a donation every week.
8. You don't have to waste hours of your life hearing some individual pontificate in a pompous and boring manner every week.
9. If you do kind and charitable things it's because that's what you want and not because somebody guilt-tripped you into it.
10. You don't have to make a fool of yourself by questioning the most basic advances of science.
11. If you fall out of love, you can split up instead of forcing yourself suffer through a loveless relationship.
12. If you are a woman, you don't grow up with constant reminders of how inferior you are.
13. If you are gay or transgender, you don't get demonized and rejected for that by a group of people who respect somebody's interpretation of some old book more than they respect actual human beings.
14. As an adult, you can evaluate all systems of belief and decide for yourself which one suits you best, which is always a lot more convenient than people having decided that for you when you were a baby with no will of your own. People who pontificate about the atrocity of arranged marriages forget how easily most of them contracted an arranged marriage with their own spirituality. Their parents decide for them on the basis of custom and tradition, and then they are condemned to be spiritual in a way that they might have never chosen if they had any say in the matter.
12. If you are a woman, you don't grow up with constant reminders of how inferior you are.
13. If you are gay or transgender, you don't get demonized and rejected for that by a group of people who respect somebody's interpretation of some old book more than they respect actual human beings.
14. As an adult, you can evaluate all systems of belief and decide for yourself which one suits you best, which is always a lot more convenient than people having decided that for you when you were a baby with no will of your own. People who pontificate about the atrocity of arranged marriages forget how easily most of them contracted an arranged marriage with their own spirituality. Their parents decide for them on the basis of custom and tradition, and then they are condemned to be spiritual in a way that they might have never chosen if they had any say in the matter.
P.S. If you want to write a response on the benefits of growing up religious, feel free. All I ask is that you try to do it without mentioning the word "community."
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