Believing there is no God lets me be proven wrong. It means I'm learning something.
I read this essay today by Penn Gillette, of Penn and Teller. It was about his beliefs that there is no God. Athiesm he says is easy. You just don't believe in God. The true test is Beliving there is no God. I found this passage esspecially convincing.
"Believing there is no God means I can't really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. This is good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try and treat people right the first time around."
This is something that ALWAYS bugged me when I was in the church circuit. Do something wrong, pray for forgivness, all is well. How does that teach anybody anything? By this line of thought you could purposely do something, bad, mean spirited, wrong, or hurtful, and just pray to jesus or whatever to forgive you for that, instead of going to the person you acted against and asking THEM for forgivness. There was another passage that said sometihng like Believing there is no God means that all the bad things in the world are not the happening because of what god wants, but what people are doing and that means that we CAN change it. We don't have to leave it all up to an invisible friend that somehow can hear the murmerings of billions of people all at once. I saw a preview for a movie by Bill Mahr and he compairs god to Santa Claus. Actually he asks the guy he is interviewing if he believes that One guy can go to every house in the world in one night. of course he laughs and says no santa clause isnt real. So Mr. Mahr asks him then how can god or jesus can hear every single prayer that is said to him at any given moment. he just kind of stands there slackjawed.
I think its pretty well known that I consider myself an athiest. And it seems like the older and wiser I get, The less and less I can buy into the whole "higher power" thing. I used to say that I didnt believe in A god, but a higher power. The more I read about and study religeous zealots, the more I just cant beileve that there is a god.
I guess I should elaborate a little bit...
When I was younger we were dragged to church, sent to bible camp, tuesday morning bible thing at the church, baptised in summit lake, youth group, etc. For a while I bought into all this and it was fun. At first I took it pretty serious. But to be honest, i never felt any different. So i started to question it. Time went on and I still did everything because i felt like i had to. At this point i still HALF believed. there was still doubt. i started to wonder, if god wants us to believe in him, wants us to love him, why is he so enigmatic? why so secretive? It says in the bible that god is jealous and vengeful. are these not virtues that his book tells us to avoid? is this the biggest case of "do what i say, not what i do" in history? it was questions like these that started me down the path of thought that maybe there wasnt A God, but a higher being. The longer I stuck around the church scene, the more and more I found that hipocracy was abound. Everyone would be all caring and pious at the events or functions or on sunday morning, but the next day or in many cases a few hours later, people would be doing the same things that made them repent only hours earlier. Not every single person, but enough that if you were looking it was thouroughly present. People were taking serious advantage of the "pray for forgiveness" loophole. More questions arose. Dinosaurs are not mentioned in the bible. (because the peope that wrote it didnt know they existed, but God should have, right? and it is God's word, or aesops fables for adults as i like to call it.) Why did people like Noah live to be 900 years old? (Ive been told because they didnt have all the chemicals around them, in thier food etc etc. if this is the case, why then in say roman times, was life expectancy 45yrs, and it has been steadily going up since then?) Well, like i said in my post, the older I get the more I see about the world and what is out there, the evedence against a supreme all knowing being is insurmountable to me. And just because I believe there is no god does not mean i am some heartless heathen who is out to rape, pillage, and steal my way to an early grave. I still stive to be a good person, who is accountable to myself and my conscience. I don't always succeed in this and when I make a mistake, I dont simply kneel before my bed and pray that i be forgiven for whatever I did wrong, I do what is in my power to correct the problem. I understand the fact that there is religion worldwide, and the need in the human psyche for somthing beyond life. And there is no way to know if there is or isnt an "afterlife" or if i will ever see my loved ones again. So what to do? I live my life as good as I can. I treat people with respect and if I'm judged for that then so be it. And If I die and there is a God Then I will have been proven wrong.