| It’s a funny thing. I’ve come to the point where I realize a lot of things do not make the man…or woman in my case. For example, weight. Some people take all types of things to get skinny. I use a weight loss pill partly because I care about my health and my weight, but I realize appearance and weight isn’t everything. It doesn’t make you a better person, a more beautiful person, any of that. But it seems in our society, we’ve come to believe that it does. Another thing that doesn’t make the person, religion. I actually have no religion. But I don’t think that keeps me from being a good person. I believe in going all or nothing. So I think being in a religion might actually make me a bad person in my own eyes. I mean shutting out my friends and family and people who have really made the biggest impact on my life, that is what I consider bad. Shutting out my gay friends with certain religions, that would make me a horrible person, at least in my own mind. And that would be horrible. But for other people, that’s something they figure they need to do, and unlike me, it doesn’t make them a bad person, but a faithful person. It may seem like a double standard to some, but to me it’s just what it is. To stop and help somebody on the street who may need it, to help a blind person cross the street, to take care of my family and friends, to not go chasing after some other woman’s husband, to treat every person I meet with respect regardless of other things, to go to a 3rd world country and help them build hospitals, those are things I don’t need a religion to tell me to do. And for me, if you need some outside force to tell you to, why are you really doing it? But all in all, I find quite a few people judge others on the small things like weight and whether they take a weight loss pill, whether they swear or not, if they have a high paying job, whether they go to church every Sunday. But for me, that stuff doesn’t matter as much as the big stuff like are you judging your neighbor, are you taking care of your family, are you showing respect for other people, are you keeping your promises, are you actually caring? |