My religious beliefs have changed an incredible amount during my journey over this past year. I got burned hard putting all my trust and faith into a religion that lied, covered up and changed a significant amount of its history. It is now impossible for me to give that level of trust and faith into something without solid evidence. Happenstance and warm feelings aren’t enough as that’s what led me into being deceived last time.
It’s funny how we insist that the older the religious rites and ideas, the more accurate and divine they are. Really, these are just old stories meant to explain what they couldn’t understand. So, we have Adam and Eve to explain the origins of man and we have a tower of babel to explain the origins of different languages. I’m not sure what Noah’s Ark was meant to explain, but it’s really impressive that the ark landed in eurasia and kangaroos somehow disembarked and made it to Austrailia.
And then we end up with a god more akin to the trickster Loki than a benevolent being as he insists we believe in a 7,000 year world where death didn’t happen until the garden of eden while filling the earth with evidence of evolution and animals that lived millions of years ago. We have to believe in the historicity of the Book of Mormon, but we can’t place where this great civilization of many hundreds of thousands lived nor find DNA evidence among their supposed ancestors to corroborate the story. Why do we have to believe in the Book of Abraham when Egyptian scholars have translated the scrolls and know they have nothing to do with what Joseph Smith claimed. It’s not a kind god who demands belief with no proof while making all the evidence in the world prove the stories wrong.
Honestly, life seems to me to be more sacred and miraculous if there wasn’t a divine creator. We clawed our way up to a civilization with art, love and beauty while everything in nature tried to kill us. We have cancer? Well yeah, clawing our way to the top of the food chain isn’t easy and we’re extremely fortunate to have what we do. Family and friends died? That’s so painful, but it’s so amazing that we got to know them in the first place, and we can be grateful for the time we had to knew them. Also, take time to develop and repair those relationships here and now as there may not be a later.
Another thing I never cared about was the state of the world. If everything went to hell, that just means the 2nd coming is happening any time, and not to worry about it because God is in charge. In fact, the sooner everything gets bad, the sooner he’ll return and save us. That mentality is terrifyingly naive! We need to fight to make this a better place at all times! And that fighting is best accomplished with ideas and education, not weapons.
With no promise of an afterlife, I really want to make this one count. I want to live this life to the fullest and achieve the most satisfaction here that I can. I used to be content with an unfulfilled life because the important thing was to do what someone else told me and give them my money and all my free time. Then after I died, surely I’ll be happy then. That’s an awfully convenient deal for those in charge of making the rules and running the religion. I can live a more fulfilling life by choosing to do what brings me the most satisfaction and personal growth. I can live a more moral life by developing my own moral compass rather than handing the reins to someone else and having them decide for me. And it’s healthier for me to take the credit and blame for my success and failures, rather than assigning everything to the outside forces of either god or the devil.