I am not a great fan of organized religion,but I am a great supporter of religion on an individual/personal level. Organized religion gives too much power to the church over the beliefs and doctrine of individuals. Each person should have their own personal relationship with Jesus and God (or the god of their personal choice). I am a firm believer in freewill and the right to choose you own spiritual path to follow. No man should have the right to force his own beliefs upon another. This is not to say I am against spreading the word of your chosen religion, just you should respect the rights of others to believe differently.
I have seen too many times people putting faith into religious leaders who wind up leading their followers into hateful and hurtful beliefs and actions. There have been many of times that religious leaders have led their followers to mass suicide or created holy wars that caused the destruction and killing of many innocent people. To put blind faith into God is okay but to put blind faith in a human being is not a good idea at best. No man is without fault and no one man should be followed blindly. Read your scriptures and keep faith god will reveal truth to you so you may not be deceived by man or any other force out to lead you astray. Use that freewill god gave you to seek out the truth along with the right path for you to follow.
I believe freewill was a gift to us from god and he gave us the right to choose our own way to live and believe. Freewill is a great blessing but it has the cost of being wrong or making the wrong choices and having to pay the price for such. Luckily most of us live long enough to make many mistakes along the way and learn what is and isn’t the right path hopefully before our time is up.
Though I know my opinions are not always right or popular , they are of my own choosing.
May Truth be your Guiding light
Raymond Barbier
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One Lifetime Blog 
I agree with you on several points here. It is all about relationship, not religion. I think religion has come to mean several things. It’s all about relationship for sure. The thing I might disagree with you about is the part about spiritual leaders. Scripture speaks often about following others, however it does say as they follow Christ. So I suppose that’s the key. We follow the leader as long as he or she follows the Leader…
Thats the point I was trying to make, having blind faith in a leader is not wise, always use the scriptures to verify what your being taught along with the common sense god blessed you with. Not all Religous leaders are lead by the Spirit of god, some are led by thier greed or thier disires to be famous or powerful. I guess there are always a few bad apples in a barrel.
Thank you for your comment and I welcome any further feedback or comment you may have. have a good day.
Raymond Barbier
I am by no means religious and personally do not believe in God, but I was religious only a few years ago in high school and I have several religious friends. Here’s my opinion on religion and “blind faith”. First let’s identify some terms:
Faith: (1) confident or trust in a person or thing. (2) belief that is not based on proof.
I think we could all agree that (2) is the definition that we could identify as “blind faith”. For example: The (2)”faith that” God exists is different from (1)”faith in” a friend or lover.
Many believers want to say that we ought to just have blind faith that God exists, and that it is virtuous to avoid/ignore evidence to the contrary of God’s existence. This view is called fideism. I am not a fan of this view.
On the other hand, there are evidentialist believers. St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, believed that you should believe everything by reason (including the existence of God). His concept of faith was literally NOTHING like blind faith. He believe one should have faith (1) in God; that is, we should “trust in” God’s character, not that we should “have faith that” God exists without any evidence or proof.
Thank you once again for another in depth comment.