Hey,
I’m curious to know what role religion plays in your day to day live as I am myself from the east of Germany which was called by the guardian the most godless place on earth a few years back and I only know very few religious people personally. My few run ins with religous folks have all been rather nice so far. Of course there’s still influences of religion in Germany as a whole but not really in my day to day live and the whole topic of religion always leaves me kind of baffled when I try to understand it, especially since there are some weird concepts that I just don’t understand logically but it seems to be rather important to a lot of people. On the flip side it seems that it’s rather important to you to proclaim that you’re non religious. Why’s that?
This is a terrible method to understand the moral character of a person. You can exchange as many minor pleasantries as you want with people in the Bible Belt or Saudi Arabia, as long as they don’t know you’re gay, trans or want an abortion.
Why am I strongly against religion? Because it’s a social institution that encourages trust based in faith, which is pretty dumb by itself, but I have also been shown again and again that sooner or later there will appear a bad actor with the clear intention to exploit it, and when the victims of their abuse try to denounce it, they will more likely than not find themselves kicked out from their own community.
To answer your question, the role of religion as an institution in my life is none, first because of the damage they have provoked on me, and second because I now actively try distancing myself from it.