Like if you love God. Share if you support the troops. Comment if you think cancer sucks. Post this if you want to raise awareness for autism.

I see messages, posts and pictures like this all day long on Facebook and every other social media site, too. I have to say, I really don’t see the point.

Those pictures and statuses seem to create the image that if you don’t do what they ask, you hate the Lord or want people to die from cancer. Some of them explicitly say that, like “share if you love God/keep scrolling if you like Satan.”

That seems a little extreme. I don’t share or like any of those things, and I don’t think that makes me a bad person.

Some of the pictures like “Like this if Jesus is your Savior” are almost as common as cat pictures or check-ins at the gym. These images attempt to make Facebook seem like more than just a social networking site. It’s just Facebook, honestly. I really doubt that God will judge people based on whether or not they liked or shared anything on Facebook.

Then there’s all the random, obscure status updates to raise awareness for one cause or another. I’ve seen posts from everything like “I left my bra on the kitchen table” to “I’m moving to Argentina” to “I’m spending 18 weeks abroad in Thailand.”

The idea seems to be that if you message the person asking about the post, they will tell you what cause it supports, and then you have to post the status, and so on and so forth.

But what good do posts like that really do? I mean, really. I can’t imagine that even a million people setting their statuses as anything has ever actually helped anyone. I get the idea of raising awareness, but this method doesn’t really inform anyone about a cause.

Things that really help raise awareness for a cause come with information like facts and statistics. They give places where information can be found or donations can be made. They reference real organizations that support that cause. You can’t just say that you’re raising awareness about something without offering some type of information about it.

These posts are becoming more of a trend than anything else. Now, there are even pictures of people holding signs asking for 100,000 likes. For what? For example, I support the troops, but I don’t think that liking a picture because a soldier wants a million likes will help them at all.  Real action needs to be taken.

If as many people that like and share all those pictures actually went out and did something, the world would be an infinitely better place. Sitting around all day, liking pictures of abused puppies is not going to save them. Sharing the picture of the little girl with leukemia will not find a cure. Posting a picture of a recycling bin and a tree won’t help the environment.

If people want to see real changes, they need to put away the computer or cell phone and do something. Adopt a kitten, donate to cancer research and pick up litter.

At the very least, stop claiming to support a cause that you do not really support. People who do support them are out there doing something about it, not hashtagging and Tweeting.

Take Gandhi’s advice and “be the change you want to see in the world.”

Religion can be spoken about freely, yet we tread softly when publically mentioning it.

But, the hardest idea to grasp is that having the right to spread religious awareness is certainly not the same as pushing beliefs on others.

While people reserve the right to practice religious freedom and to speak without restraint about any faith they choose, forcing others to listen isn’t freedom of speech; it’s harassment.

There are over 127 major religions and seven billion people on earth with seven billion different views of God. Some love Him, some fear Him, some question His existence and some are still searching for Him.

Some will decide that God plays no role in the trials and tribulations of life, while others will find faith the moment they see their newborn child take the first breath of being.

Whether we discover where we spiritually belong in a pew on Sunday morning or on a lonely drive with no destination, the journey to finding or forgetting God is what determines our views. We can’t be told what and who to believe in, or to even believe in anything at all.

What we learn, who we meet and the challenges we face are what we remember when we stand before Him, not the church members that knock on our front doors, or the people that stand in the quad condemning us all to hell.

And if the church goer at your front door changes your perspective, let them. Be baptized in one church, change your mind, and be baptized in another. Let what you learned in biology class make you question evolution and the powers above.

Learning from life experiences and questioning God’s ways isn’t sin; it’s human. It’s human to change emotionally, mentally, and spiritually when physical surroundings change. It’s human to simply be curious and indecisive.

Faith only exists because there are people that believe strongly enough in it to make it a reality and a way of life. Without doubters and differences, the strength of religion would never have anything to be measured against.

Because of that, religion without true belief is weak.

Never practice out of habit, don’t follow just because your parents or friends do, and don’t ever think one religion is superior to another. In a time that seems to have the explanation for everything in a test tube or on a database, people believing in any God at all is a miracle in itself.