“Doubt, skepticism, and outright unbelief have always taken the same essential form as they do today. There were always shrewd comments on the way in which religion reflected human wishes or human designs. It was never that difficult to see that religion was a cause of hatred and conflict, and that its maintenance depended upon ignorance and superstition,” Christopher Hitchens, God is not Great.

We are constantly obsessed with dragging people into our set of beliefs rather than allowing each other to live through our differences and understand the importance of such a notion. We hardly ever agree that one could remain true and sincere to his practiced faith while still learning from and accepting different teachings.

Why can’t religious people let atheists explore their philosophical thoughts and allow them to live peacefully without triggering the need for them to hide in their thoughts or keep their views buried forever? Why do the world’s three largely practiced religions insist on finding flaws in one another as they shun every other practiced faith, or none at all?

After decades of coexistence through every day life activities, I find it absolutely shameful that we, especially in our modern days, still find so many ways to bicker and fixate on our differences. What makes it even more shameful is how we misuse and ignorantly abuse the mere idea of a religion, that I would bet millions of us do not even understand the core values of.

What is it that we take from religion and decide to apply and stick to so strongly while we judge others who don’t do the same? I feel that over the years, we have managed to neglect the most important values as we blindly obsess about being ‘religious.’

You would think that the human race has been through enough to finally get it.

I believe it’s all about compassion, ethics and a conscience always kept alive; these to me are what constitute any faith worth following and believing in. Whether that faith has books dating before Christ, put together through oral dictation of an angel to an illiterate prophet or based on historical anecdotes — or even on a set of your own beliefs — is irrelevant. I don’t care and I believe, neither should you.

We have managed to bury our conscience, each one of us, one way or another, into the deepest rut, just because it is so much easier to give in to more accessible belief systems than to make an effort to simply think. Those morals that we believe in, if not challenged, would only end up being a set of rotten beliefs that we have allowed to lead astray our otherwise healthy conscience.

If we care enough to really be true to ourselves and respect whatever faith we choose to believe and give in to, then the least we should do is really make the effort to get down to its basics.

It is really all up to you to choose. You can live your life in hypocrisy to yourself and to others and pretend to believe in something that is so much bigger than what you can handle, simply because you refuse to understand it. Alternatively, you can choose to think.

I beg you to bring your conscience back to life and to use it the next time you decide to pick a fight, make a point, support an argument, make a decision, label someone or make a judgment call just because that other person believes in another God or none at all.