From a blog I'd not heard of before, Oh For the Love of God, via Zero Boss comes a story of one person losing their religion. I can fully agree with the blogger's points on becoming atheist/agnostic. Once I started to question the beliefs I'd been taught as a child, it was like kicking off the brakes and taking the car out of gear on a steep hill. I suppose my hill wasn't so steep at the beginning, or maybe the car just took a few years to reach a decent speed.
Christians especially like to see disbelief as a sort of moral failing. The Bible even mentions it as such and discusses people who have hardened their hearts toward god. That's rarely the case in my experience. I have no doubt that there are people who don't disbelieve but have anger toward the god they feel has wronged them.
My own atheism is probably an example similar to the growing disbelief of many people. I didn't turn away from god nor did I grow unhappy with the religious restrictions. I did start to question, and I found all too often that the answers to those questions just weren't good enough. How unsatisfying is it to hear "because I said so" as a child when we question our parents? How much more so from a religious leader in lieu of an actual answer from a caring god?
2 comments:
Have you read Carl Sagan's book "Varieties of Scientific Experience"? It's a really interesting agnostic, scientific query into the existence of God/a god/ many gods/a creator.
I came into my beliefs about God the same way you did. I asked questions. And people were annoyed with me. I was just supposed to "believe" without questioning. Well, I still asked questions, and the questions just don't have an answer.
So, I ended up turning to Zen Buddhism, mostly because the whole philosophy is to ask questions. I could dig on that. In the end, I don't think it matters what we believe. Because things are how they are, not matter what.
I just hope that when we die, we either get an explanation somehow, or we lose the need to want to know about it. The question of God and all that comes with it causes so much pain and suffering in this life, I just hope that in the next, all of that is moot and we can just move on and be done with such myopic human concerns.
I have to laugh when I realize, as an adult, that I must have been the bane to my grandfather's, the pastor, existence. I was always asking those pesky logical questions..."How can all the Egyptians have gone to Hell if Christ wasn't born yet?" "Why would I bother to pray to God if he thinks I am so much lower than boys?" etc. Funny though, years of indoctrination never let me question the BIG parts, until I went to college and really was allowed to THINK for the first time. Thanks for the link to the article!
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