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Originally Posted by SnowwwWhite  Looking back I really feel pretty stupid for buying into religion, but I forgive myself when I realize that I had been brainwashed from a very young age. I was brought up shielded from the "real world" and my parents probably just expected me to grow up and be a preacher's wife someday. Funny thing, we were always taught how other religions were cults. I'm sorry to say, but if you compare practices and beliefs it's obvious that Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Catholics, etc. are no different from Jehovah's Witnesses or Scientology. If your mind is being indoctrinated to reject science, to follow obscure laws and teachings, and to believe you're going to heaven and everyone who doesn't believe your version is going to hell... IT'S A CULT! |
Don't feel stupid for believing it. Something like 98% of the world's population believes in a form of universal Intelligence...some people call it God.
I'm a pretty smart girl (I think, anyway), and I think of a lot of big questions that few people in my everyday life bother to entertain. It's not hard to dig one's self into a funk of existential depression. Science does a good job of explaining many things but it's a helluva long way from answering the burning questions I have. If nature makes such sense and follows such undeniable logic, then what the fuck happened with human beings?? We're a sick infestation. We form a film around the planets water bodies, like scum around the tub. We secrete toxins that poison our host. We make the whole planet sick. And we're so screwed up, we can't even cooperate! Ant colonies and bee hives operate with perfect precision, working toward a common goal. What's our excuse?
My mind would fry to a crisp if I couldn't find some peace somehow, and so that's why I choose to believe that there's something greater than myself out there. There's no harm in this - and in fact much good in it - as long as I can conscientiously maintain its positivity. If I don't, I've just joined the clusterfuck that is "The Church". Keep it positive, and it allows me to live in child-like wonder at the world around me, let go of the questions that humankind is simply not equipped to answer (trees falling in the forest and that kind of stuff), and live my life with hope, joy, love and freedom. If atheism brings you this, I won't shove anything else down your throat. It's just none of my business. And if you're right (that we all just turn to dust and extinguish when we die), then what are you going to do? Gloat? LOL You can't say anything, and I bloody well couldn't hear you anyway.
Living with hope and faith is more valuable to me than living without it. It's a deliberate choice, not the default.