My parents live in what I would call the "Deep South". Ocilla/Tifton/Fitzgerald, Georgia. My dad had a heart attack and was admitted to the hospital in Tifton and then Albany, Georgia. For a week straight I've been hearing religious comments from the nurses and the other patient's families. All of them were specifically Christian (and mostly Baptist) statements.
Two of them were repeated often, by various people:
When faced with good news, "God was here today/yesterday, etc."
My favorite is: "I don't know how people without Faith get through this."
I capitalize the word faith because in the Christian culture faith is a tangible, specific idea relating only to the Christian god. When they say "people without faith" they truly mean non-Christians, not just atheists. They are almost all completely unaware that faith can exist in any religion but their own, and if it does exist, it is wrongly placed, or even "a deception by Satan" as I have been told personally.
People only have the strength to handle life's tough situations if they have Faith in God, therefore Strength comes from God alone.
This is the same argument that religious people make about morality. People can only behave well if they are religious (or are of a certain Religion, depending on who you ask), therefore Morality comes from God alone.
This idea that only god makes these things possible seems to go against my opinion that religion serves only as an outlet for Man's egocentrism, but it really doesn't.
Being Strong or being Morally Just is really just the gold star you get to wear for having enough Faith in your God. It's the pat on the back you get from yourself and others for being more Righteous than the next guy.
