Religion is giving me a headache.

I’m not ashamed to own up to my beliefs: I believe in medicine, art, science and God. They co-exist peacefully in my mind and give me a comforting and hopeful outlook on our future. It’s obvious, however, that not everyone is as content as I. The biggest mystery for me remains the hypocrisy that is tearing religion apart. Hypocrisy has been a destructive and unfortunate part of religion ever since the beginning of time. From holy wars to anti-abortionists bombing clinics and murdering doctors, humans seem incapable of adhering to their own doctrines of love and peace, no matter how many centuries pass.

My boyfriend once found an anti-Islam pamphlet in a bathroom and showed it to me. It was a cartoon of a Christian helping a Muslim to “realize” that his religion came from nothing more than pagan beliefs and that Allah was just another product of paganism. I nearly choked to death on my frustration. Apparently the cartoonist didn’t do his homework, or he would have realized that a) Allah and God are one and the same, b) Islam regards both the Old and New Testaments as religious texts, and c) that most Christian rituals stem from pagan beliefs and rituals as well.

Yesterday I saw a bumper sticker in a parking lot that I really liked. It simply said “co-exist,” the letters constructed of various religious symbols. “Yes!” I thought. But why are we as humans so incapable of co-existence with one another? Why do we squabble and argue and cause so much hurt and pain for one another?

I don’t pretend to know all the answers to everything, not by any stretch of the imagination, nor do I claim to always be exempt from prejudice. But if I could hazard a guess, I would say that it comes from ignorance. We are ignorant of one another, and it is easy to hate what you don’t know.

So what about solutions? A wise, philosophical friend of mine once told me that what the world needs is something to bring it together. It needs an invasion of zombies or aliens to make us all band together for a common cause, against a common enemy. Zombies seem too unlikely, and the Star Trek timeline doesn’t put us at first contact with the Vulcans until 2063 after practically everyone is dead from World War III. So in the meantime, I’m going to say that what we need to do is to learn. We should try to become interested in and understand other cultures, to discover how much we have in common, to integrate some of our differences into our repertoire of beliefs. If we all (myself included) make more of an effort, perhaps we can skip World War III altogether.