The World Is Full Of Gods

            When I started this blog I was only doing it for a grade. As many of my reader know I am in an English Comp class at Jacksonville State University taught by Tanya Sasser. Over the course of the semester I have tried to inform my readers of the various religions that exist and have existed over the course of human history. I tried to let you know about different things that those people believe, or to give you insight to why they lived their lives in a certain way.

·         Vikings Believed that you could only enter Valhalla of you were killed in battle. So they spent much of their life pillaging and burning other civilizations. 

Photo fromWikiCommons

·         Snake Handlers think that if you are a true Christian you are invincible (they’re obviously wrong).

Photo courtesy of The Iranian

·         Hindus and Buddhists believe that you have to answer for your actions weather you “repent” of them or not. Karma even follows you to the next life, this makes them (mostly) very peaceful people.

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·         Mormons believe that it is possible for a man to rise to the level of God, if he is important enough (like John Smith). They also believe some other crazy stuff (i.e. Burnt people, and Magic Underpants)

·         Greeks believed their Gods to be fallible and imperfect.

·         Christians believe that as long as they believe in Jesus and repent of their sins, God will forgive them no matter what they do.

Photo from Outside the camp

·         Atheists don’t believe in any of it. We just feel like everyone should be good to each other and get along.

 

Photo from Greg Laden

·         I even showed how religions borrow stories from one another.

Every one of these groups of people feel like their answer is the only correct answer.

Everyone feels like everyone else is wrong.  Each religion has a way of forcing their beliefs on another. For some, like Jehovah’s Witness, this involves knocking on your door at 6 a.m. on Saturday morning. For others, like the Catholic Church, this involves forcing the rest of the world to accept their morals, weather we believe them or not. In many cases spreading the word of religion can be a good thing, many missionaries travel to other countries and build homes and schools, feed, and clothe poor children. But in some cases it is taken too far, today in America, we deny marriages, abortions, birth control, and even sex education all based off the religious views of one group of Americans. We all need to step back and try and see the world through the eyes of someone else sometimes. We get so caught up in our own culture that we forget that other people see things differently, this doesn’t make them inherently bad, this only makes them different. 

 

Pic from ReasonedRants

            Even though the class I started this blog for ends this week, I will still continue to post until people stop reading. Thank you to all of my classmates who have helped me become a better writer over the last few months. I wish you all the best of luck.

Photo from OlaBetiku

 

Religionless

I was started in church earlier then I can even remember. Every Sunday my mother would load my sister, brother, and I into the station wagon and take us to pick up our grandmother. We would then head out to a small Baptist church somewhere in Decatur, Georgia. I have vague memories of Sunday school and I seem to remember getting disciplined on more than one occasion for climbing in the church.

        After a few years my mom stopped taking us and we mostly just forgot about church in general. I didn’t start going to church again until I was in middle school, then I went to Zion Christian Fellowship in Lithia Springs. Church was a good escape from my home life and whenever things would get bad at home I would go to church. There I learned many things about the bible. I developed a close friendship with the pastor and his family.  I became a rather devout Christian for some time, but the more I learned about the bible and the more I watched the news and learned about the world I started to have questions. Why is God so cruel? Why in the bible did God turn Lot’s wife to a pillar of salt simply for looking back towards home? How did God make light before he made a light source? Why did he need to send Jesus to die for our sins? If he were truly all powerful could he not simply forgive us?

Image from: Think That Through

         By high school I started to learn the theory of evolution and saw how it contradicted the creation story in Genesis. And it occurred to me, if one part of this book is untrue than the book as a whole loses credit as being fact. It was then that I decided to look into other religions. I spent much of the next couple of years looking into different religions, my mother works at a book distributor so this made it easy for me to have fairly unlimited access to many religious texts. For a short time in tenth grade I started a “coven” with a few other friends from school, we really didn’t do anything but draw pentagrams on all of our stuff, dress in all black, and read a lot of books on witch craft. I looked briefly into the Necronomicon which is a book on summoning the dead, but couldn’t take it seriously. All these things had one major flaw in common. They all had a creation stories or similar stories that contradicted known scientific facts. Buddhism, in my opinion, is the only contradiction to the previous statement. A quote from Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama says "if scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims." I wish all religions would be so reasonable, but I will talk more about Buddhism in a later post.

        It was at this point that I turned my attention and efforts to my science book. I found an abundance of answers to nearly all my questions. Why is the universe so big? Where did it all come from? Which came first the chicken or the egg? How can there be life and beauty without god/ gods? It was only after much study and debate that today I confidently call myself an Atheist. I honestly do not believe that any gods exist; we are here through random chance. The fact that there is no god does not make life any less beautiful or meaningful. In fact I think it makes life more important, we don’t need to focus on what we imagine will happen to our “spirit” when we die. We need to focus on living the only life we will ever get and make the most of it. Not believing in god does not make me immoral either, I chose to be good because it is the right thing to do, not because I think I will be punished for all eternity. I don’t however think that other people should have to give up their religions, some people need a coping mechanism to keep them happy until such a time as their heart stops, their brain turns off and they go into the ground forever. Because once someone is dead, they will never know if they were wrong.