This is going to get me in trouble...
The hardest path you will ever tread is your own.
A simple statement, and one that is very true (though, see the discussion in a previous post for an important point about truth). But one that is either ignored or simply not thought of by a good portion of the world's population. You know who you are, though you probably don't realize yet that I'm talking about you. The major issue that it comes down to is choice, and all that choice entails, and the lack of choice, and all that entails.
Choice is a paradox within itself. It implies a freedom, while forcing a constraint. You are FREE to choose, but in that freedom you are FORCED to choose. With choice also come consequences, that for your choice you are punished AND rewarded, no matter what it is that you were forced into choosing. Because of the freedom of choice, you are wholly responsible for these consequences, but because of the tyranny of choice, you cannot avoid them. Therefore you are beset with doubts about your choice, confusions about the consequences and results, guilt at the bad and joy at the good, neither altogether pure. This is what it means to walk your own path, a constant whirl of certainty and doubt, happiness and despair, confusion and clarity.
The alternative is not to choose, that is, to suborn your will to that of another (the discussion of Will itself is a long one, and best presented at another time). Not choosing frees you from responsibility for your actions, from the guilt at their outcomes and from the confusion that can generate. When you do not choose (again paradoxically, this is a choice within itself) you divorce yourself from your life, and become barely more than a dead thing, a tool in some other hand. This is extraordinarily easy, once you make that first, fatal choice. This path is the simplest, this path is the easiest, this path the most likely to be the one you were told to follow since childhood. This, people, is the path of religion.
If you were to read the Confessions of Saint Augustine, at the end of the second paragraph of Book IX you would see this: "And all you asked of me was to deny my own will and accept yours." This is a foundational text of christian thought. Our vaunted human 'Free Will' is all so that we can freely accept god and thereafter have him work through us. Islam is even stricter in this regard (the eastern religions have something similar, but not similar enough to comment on, and all Judaism is, is rules)
This idea is wholly contrary to my very existance, as I feel in every fiber of my not inconsiderable being that to freely relinquish one's own will is WRONG. As in Evil, people! As in the work of Satan, Beelzebub, Lucifer, George W. Bush, Baal, Set, Loki, Kronus, Tiamat, Cthulhu, Sauron, you get the picture.
Then again, I'm a proto-Nietzschian with two and a half years of formal thought training under my belt.
The real problem is that the religious often cite their path (whichever one that may be, I'm not going to name names here, though I think you can all guess the object of my ire) as the more difficult one. It isn't. It's the easier way, and if you had to make a choice that wasn't informed by whatever your leader's purport your god to say on the subject, then you'd understand that.
Comments off, this one stands on its own, folks.
Oh, and it's remembrance day, please think of those who have died in any war and every war. There's way more of them than there are of us.