Anyone else struggle with cynical/rude thoughts towards religious people?

[Angrboda]

I recently had an epiphany. There was a commercial where a couple at a wedding was watching football on a phone and they absent-mindedly cheered after a good play. Everybody else at the wedding thought it was a reaction to the best man's speech or some other normal wedding thing. And it made me remember a time in my youth when I did something embarrassing at a wedding, something I've felt regret about since then, and it made me realize that what I was doing was no more heinous or worthy of regret than what the people in the commercial did. We all do stupid things on a pretty regular basis, especially growing up, and we can choose to feel bad and feel shame about it, or we can just chalk it up to our being stupid, just like everybody else. We're just as human, fallible, and stupid as everyone else, and that's okay. It's really okay that I did that stupid thing 40 years ago. I don't have to drag it around the rest of my life like the Albatross in the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. It's okay.

That, and the topic of this thread bring to mind how I've felt about religion. Yes, from the outside it can look stupid and silly, but so can a ton of other things we humans do. We aren't rational creatures. I'm sure an alien peering at me through a remote observation device would wonder what the hell I'm doing when I sit down with my XBOX controller and play videogames. Or why I don't simply cook the things that I know how to cook instead of constantly making bad food trying new recipes. Or why I tell the white lies and lies of omission that I do instead of just bluntly, if impoliticly, telling the truth. Humans are a silly species. As Dostoevsky said, if the world was rational, nothing would ever happen. Our reasons and rationality are a veneer on top of a maelstrom of emotions, desires, sexual attraction, obsession, and other stuff which from the outside probably looks rather silly and stupid. So I give religious people a pass. The things they do and believe aren't significantly sillier or less rational than a ton of other stuff that we accept as normal. I think being religious is an okay way to be. I accept the individual. I may think differently about religion as a movement or as an institution, but on an individual, personal level, it's no more something to get bent about than that someone is of a different political party, or collects porcelain cats, or dresses up in fake armour and gets together with their fellow SCA members to beat on each other. At a distance, it's all silly. That's what we are. And that's okay.