I suppose I would have considered myself of Christian faith at one stage. I was baptized in a Catholic church, attended convent schools, made my first holy Communion and Confirmation, the whole shebang. From what I can remember, the first time I began to question my faith was during my school days when my religion teacher said that we were all born as sinners. My initial reaction was ”Hang on, I thought sinners were bad people. What did I do wrong being born?” My teacher elaborated by saying that sinners were also people who didn’t believe in God, and that when we are born we don’t believe in God. I found it unfair that as infants we were doomed to burn in hell until we were old enough for school. I also considered the type of people that didn’t have a faith, but were genuinely good people nonetheless. Why did they face punishment when they had done nothing wrong?
I started poking holes in the book of Genesis. I was particularly bothered by original sin back in the Adam and Eve days. What we are made to believe is that one day God appeared and said “Hey guys! I’m just gonna leave this delicious fruit tree right here. But don’t eat from it or else. You can eat anything else except this delicious fruit. You can even eat the fruit of that other tree over there, but not this one. I’m warning you.” Silly Christian God, does he know nothing of human nature? He did create us right? So when he did catch Adam and Eve nomming on said fruit tree he threw a hissy fit and kicked them out of Eden. How immature of a deity that is supposedly perfect in every way. In fact, a lot of the book Genesis makes the Christian God out to be a spoiled child. Anytime he doesn’t get his way it’s plagues here and floods there and all because he endowed us with free will. The bible makes humanity out to be God’s failed experiment, and this centuries old grudge is why he doesn’t appear to us in a burning bush anymore.
I became more and more inclined to believe that the reason we are all here is a bit more complicated than some dude that poofed us into existence. So does this mean I’m an atheist? Well, yes and no. I suppose the atheist in me tends to reject most religions, as I generally see them as either immoral or illogical. I’m strongly opposed to corruption in the church, the abhorrent treatment of women in the middle east and anyone who thinks that mass suicide or murder is a ticket into paradise (a rather stone age frame of mind when you consider sacrificial rituals performed by ancient Aztecs and such). If, hypothetically, the Christian god came and punched me in the face for not believing in him, I’d say “Ok, fair enough, but I still disagree with your religion.” My problem with atheism however is simply the lack of belief in anything at all. For atheists, there is simply nothing beyond this physical world in which we live. There is also a sense of snobbery towards people who do have a faith which I find somewhat puerile. For example, I was bickering with a companion of mine not so long ago in which I used the phrase “Go to hell.” Now it was blatantly a figure of speech on my part but my friend responded rather snidely saying, “Yeah sure…‘hell’”. His attitude implied that he was insulting my intelligence, that he knew there was no hell and that I was a lesser person than he for thinking otherwise. I’m not generalizing all atheists, but those who do carry that attitude are really just as bad as devout theists with the utmost belief that all atheists are going to hell if they don’t convert. I won’t dither on about the war of the faiths, so for now I will change the topic to agnosticism.
I simply refuse to believe in nothing. Do I believe in an afterlife? Well, why should that matter when it doesn’t apply to us in this life? Let’s worry about an afterlife when or if we ever get there. Do I believe in a deity? Well that’s a little trickier. In most religions, deities are given human traits or forms because this is what is familiar to us. If there are sentient beings that transcend the boundaries of physics that we know today, they are probably so incomprehensible to the human brain that we will never know of their existence. There is much scientific, and even philosophical, banter relating to a multiverse, but since the universes that comprise this multiverse exist outside our own physical laws, they simply cannot be observed. So how did we get here? Let’s assume the Big Bang theory is how it all happened. Let’s assume that the universe once existed as a hot, dense mass that exploded and cooled into this current ever expanding universe. It seems fairly reasonable. So what was there before the Big Bang? What if our current universe suddenly stops expanding, and is contracted towards a gravitational epicenter? Perhaps our current universe is the by-product of the previous universe’s system reboot. What if the universe is just a result of infinite implosions and explosions? It still doesn’t explain how matter of any kind came into existence. We are forever faced with the chicken and the egg conundrum. Currently, scientists are working with particle colliders to figure out if any of these theories hold true. Maybe that’s what we are: the result of a scientist’s particle collider… A human’s life is so short that we will never fully comprehend infinity.
As humans, we should embrace our curious nature. Reasoning that the creation of all space and time is down to one being with super powers is a bit of a lazy way out in my opinion. It is so narrow minded to think that nothing exists outside of our physical laws. It is also so ridiculously trivial to declare that one religion is more right than another, when we are all insignificant specks of dust with no control over our own fates anyway. If there is one teaching I can agree on in Christianity it’s “Do on to others as you would have them do onto you.” We don’t need a religion to keep us in line though, we should know the difference between right and wrong. We don’t need to devoutly worship something, that may or may not exist, to stay off the sinners list. And we certainly don’t need to wage war over our clashing opinions. We have only one little world to share amongst ourselves and we may as well just tolerate each other while we’re on it. Peace and love to all, for whatever reason we are here =)
I think this makes me agnostic-atheist.
