Religion and belief - distorted view

All aggression happening in the world around us, based on any religious belief systems clearly show that the difference between ‘religion' and ‘belief' is not well-understood. We all look out for a spiritual awe or expereince in our lives. Inorder to express any experiences we confide or believe in, we need a system. A belief system. Religion in my opinion, is an attempt to codify and formalize a spiritual experience. But that formalization distorts and destroys what it was attempting to preserve or control, in the first place.

Take butterfly collecting for example. When I see the brightly colored wings fluttering by, full of life and beauty, I say that it is a wonderful butterfly. Then someone comes by with a net catches the butterfly, kills it, and mounts it to a piece of cardboard with a pin through it's middle where it decays. Looking at the dead insect will give you none of the experience of witnessing the actual living flying butterfly. Truthfully, it would be difficult to say that you had even seen a butterfly- as you look at the dead one on a display card.

This is the analogy. Religion takes some spiritual experience that may have once been alive, kills it, and tries to pass it off as something living. In my opinion this is the true evil of religion. The more we try to preserve or protect our spiritual expereince through religious activites, the more we are killing it. Let us keep spirituality alive, not kill it.