Hello fellow heathen, believer and those in between!
This is the very first post on this new blog and I'm excited to get back writing them. Recently, I've had the urge to get some thoughts down in an arena where everyone can read and I could get some feedback. Other than Facebook posts, that are limited to my Facebook friends who are probably annoyed many times, I've not done much writing on the subject of religion and politics. I've also noticed quite a few people around my age(many younger) that are probably going through, or beginning to go through, the wonderful trip of disbelieving in a higher-power and seeing religion in ways they have never seen it before. I know it always helped me, when I first began to question my beliefs until now, to learn about others going through the same thing. It is not an easy time. When you begin to question something in your life like religion, it can be very scary. It is absolutely life-changing. Your entire belief system, the prism in the way you look at countless things in life, changes. That's frightening. When you know someone is going through or has gone through what you have, such as letting go on a God you now know was never there, it provides peace and removes some of the coldest loneliness someone can experience.
I grew up in a fairly religious family. Everyone is, to some degree, a Christian. Some just carry the Christian-card, others devoutly tune into the Jesus Show every week at their steeple-shaped slice of heaven. What religion did to me more than anything was scare the hell out of me. I still have internal scares. My entire worldview was shaped by Christianity whether I knew it or not. Under the false belief that you have "freewill", you don't even realize how much of a hold a religion has on you. You cling to things that make no sense whatsoever. You hate people that you have never met. You refuse to listen to music, watch certain television programs, read certain books etc., all because it may move a rock you have been standing on your entire life. You've yet to realize the sturdiness of that holy rock, how fragile it really is. Once the jury is out on freewill, you realize how little freedom accompanies religion and the questions start pouring out. How can religious person assert that they have the ability to choose the path they're on when the alternative is always eternal torture in a fiery hell? You don't, but it is a fallacy that many go through life believing.
When I was around sixteen I had began to reject the idea of organized religion itself. I began to fully question, rather cautiously, when I was around eighteen years old. I still ascribed to the Christian religion, but the blatant hypocrisy of some of the followers I encountered and the discovery of the religion being run like a business was too much. I have found that this happens to many that begin to question what they've been taught their whole lives. The beginning of a process of unraveling the tight religious binds. A step program in which you're told is actually the stair-steps down to the pits of hell. I am still on my staircase, though I like to think of it as a slow-moving, heathens escalator. The escalator sometimes breaks down and goes slower than I'd like it. Even so, it's always moving forward, upwards, pulling away from all of the cross-bearing hands that held me down. And if you know how escalators work (I hope you do, anyway), you know that you're only on one with others that are going to up with you. The ones going down aren't in your way, as try as they might to grab you with them in passing. I hope that lame analogy helps you understand what I'm trying to say and also realize that I'm sometimes terrible with analogies.
I experienced discrimination and judgement from strangers, co-workers, friends and family (when confronting them on certain views) because of my secularism. Living in a very conservative area in the Bible Belt, non-believers aren't well-received. Even with that reality, I've learned of quite a few young people in my area rejecting what they've been taught. Many are rejecting church and organized religion. Many don't like Christians bashing their gay friends and the community. Many are simply recognizing the conceptual flaws of the omnipotent and questioning the idea of a God itself. A sign of light in an area largely ruled by dark-age mentalities. I believe that when religion is examined, put on trial and viewed through unbiased prisms, it is rejected or at the very least, found wanting. Even with that being the case, there's still so many that fight off the intellectually responsible urge to question absurdities and seek out solace rooted in logic. It's unfortunate since logic and reason are in short supply around here. I gave in to that urge and it was one of the best decisions I have ever made. I only wish that everyone can experience what I have. While it is no small task, the bondage-busting breakthrough is far more rewarding than the false sense of security I received in the Pentecostal-penitentiary I was confined to.
Some may be reading this and thinking that I'm exaggerating or wondering how I could be so happy letting go of what they lean on so much. In regards to my personal experience, I'm not exaggerating at all. It really is an unbelievable freeing of me as a person. When you remove the holy water from your ears that drown out reason, unanswered questions multiply while at the same time things make a lot more sense. Simply shutting down and repeating "God did it!" isn't satisfying anymore. It's not easy and is little more than frightening. You begin to wonder how you ever believed what you did. How could you have ever rejected something so obvious as evolution, writing it off as implausible, yet accepting you came from dirt and the finished products rib? Sharing a common-ancestor with an ape isn't quite far-fetched, is it? It's not hard to understand that stories that claim the entire earth was flooded and the only ones that survived were a 900 year old man(and his family) who built an ark and collected all of the species of animals on the planet two-by-two doesn't come from the apex of human intelligence. These are things that you're suppose to accept without question, but how can you do that if yearn for the truth? That's why questioning is a sin, punishable by forever-after in hell.
You also realize that your morals have little to do with your religion. Not surprisingly, the idea of not killing someone or taking their things comes somewhat naturally. You also realize that book written by primitive men several millenniums ago isn't the best place to draw guidance from. After all, how much morality can be derived from a book that tells you how to treat your slaves (Leviticus 25:44-46, Exodus 21:2-6) or requires rapists to marry their victims as punishment (Deuteronomy 22:28-29)? Some of the many things you won't hear during your average sermon on Sunday morning. It is often ignored that there really isn't only ten commandments, they're actually part of 613 mosaic laws that every Christian likely breaks everyday without ever knowing it.What "morality" that can be applied to modern day society can be chalked up to common sense. It can also be found in religions and societies far predating Christianity. For example, the Golden Rule (Do unto others...) can be found in ancient Babylon, China, Greece, Egypt etc. centuries before.Also long before it can be found in Buddhism, Hinduism and a list of other religions predating Christianity. That leads me to the one question that always stumps every religious person I have asked is "What about religions that came before Christianity?". Christianity is around 2,000 years old and anywhere between 3,300-3,800 years old if we count Judaism and the Old Testament. In terms of religions, it's an infant. Homo-sapiens are about 200,000 years old and the oldest religion in its simplest form is probably around 100,000 years old. There were thousands of religions long before Christianity, most of which many have never heard of, but even Buddhism and Hinduism long predates it. My question always was how could a religion so young be the right/true one if I was a believer? It's like saying a small child is the father of a middle-aged man. It's simply not possible. If it was, then why did God wait so long to reveal it to the world? We can only assume that all those before were sent to hell since they weren't Christians. If that's the case, how fair is that to all of those that lived during that time? For the time being I'm going to ignore the fact that the concept of hell is virtually non-existent in the Old Testament. As troubling as I found this fun-fact, the more digging around I did, the more the foundation of what I believed and had been taught crumbled. When I began to study other religions, it became pretty obvious that Christianity and Jesus wasn't the O.G.(original God) of deities. There's multitude of stories of found in the bible, from the flood to the garden of Eden, to the glaringly similar stories of Gods that were claimed to be born of a virgin, was the son of God, had 12 disciples, was crucified and resurrected etc. and they all predated the story of Jesus. A simple search of figures like Horus, Mithras, Krishna, Buddha, Attis and many others all but proves that the suspected sacred scripture is borrowed and combined with religions that came before it as they did as well. When a simple Google search can show how fragile the structure and tenets upon which your religion stands, it becomes obvious why questioning is so frowned upon. The fear of questioning is something I personally struggled with. When I found a particular fact that refuted something so dear to me, I literally got that sinking feeling in my hear. At first I attributed it to the feeling that I was doing something wrong, that by simply taking in this new knowledge, I'd go to hell. Now I believe that it was fear coupled with a broken heart of believing the falsehoods of a fable veiled as something more. The lies of the Lord. The pillars of the basis of my faith were being chipped away deep inside me and I didn't want to acknowledge it. It was a tough pill to swallow, but I found I was strong enough to endure it and so glad I did. I went all-in, still afraid because hell still existed in my world that was now upside down. Having my deeply-held beliefs being taken from me by a just thief called reason was one of the best things that ever happened to me.
I also learned of the strength inside myself and others around me, a discovery that has left me in awe. When you remove the notion that all good things are a product of an alleged all-mighty and all of the ills of the world are the result of prodding pitchforked man with a high tolerance for heat, you see the world in a completely different way. When you remove the idea of God, you see how beautiful nature is all on it own. When you remove the idea of God, you see the incredible things us humans have done in regards to science in particular, all on our own. It's all around us. When the idea of God is rejected, you also see a lot frightening and negative things as well. You learn the sources of negative things can't be chalked up a man named Lucifer out to get you. You understand that sometimes bad things sometimes happen because of choices you or others made. One of the major issues I have with religion is that it claims to encourage responsibility, but does the exact opposite. With religion, things seem to never be in your control. When you make a mistake it's said that it's the Devil's work or an evil force creeping into your soul. How can a person truly accept responsibility for their actions when that is their mentality? It stifles growth as a human being, eliminating potential lesson-learning moments we all need in our slow stride to become a better person. It also requires you to attribute the good things you do to some mysterious high-power that can be the only source of good. How can a person realize the inner-strength, when they're always immediately handing off the accolades and shouting their well-deserved praises to this attention craving, insecure being lingering in the heavens? This is especially bad when these ideas are instilled on you as a child, a time where developing into your own and understanding responsibility is extremely important. There's evidence that we're born with strength, kindness, compassion and a plethora of other qualities. We're also born without religion or a God, that's taught to us later on. Where you're born and who your parents worship is the biggest influence on what religion you choose to go with. Most don't ever question it and are fooling themselves if they claim they came to their conclusion independently(though not always the case). We also have one thing in common at birth, we all come into this world as atheists. We don't believe in any higher-being until it's taught/instilled/indoctrinated in us. Our secularism is universal, it's only taken away and replaced later on. While that's the reality, religious people are still atheists when it comes to the thousands of religions/Gods in the world. They dismiss them without hesitation and without examination. Why is it that atheists are castigated and demonized when we only reject one more God than most believers? We've simply examined your religion and found it as implausible and untrue as you have perhaps have with Islam or Hinduism. The whole "get em' while they're young" approach religion takes is extremely unfair. Children are too malleable and vulnerable to have something so complex as religion put on their plate, a plate that's full enough with understanding the world as it is. I find it deplorable to tell someone, especially a young person, that they're not good enough and are damned to hell if they don't do what men said was right and wrong thousands of years ago. It's equally as bad to turn them against groups of people they have never met(or sometimes friends with) because supposedly their God told someone, who told someone, who in return told someone else and they wrote it down and are bad people and will burn in hell...or at least that's what the handed down word says(no one who wrote the bible ever met Jesus according to the dates we know) that was translated through many languages, then cherry-picked and edited by the Catholic Church.
So, please forgive me for believing that we're just as good without God no matter what anyone says.
In short, religion simply hinders growth that little can replace and drains us of desperately needed confidence during a time when confidence is the most valued commodity. With all of this, on top of being blindfolded of the god-less beauty around us, religion removes us from the narrow and hard-to-find path of happiness. Which is why it's better to remove it. Religion is a perpetrator of many crimes. Guilty of theft of person-hood, robbery of the recognition of human resiliency, and hijacking of the imagination with other charges pending.
I could go on and on about this and I will with each blog post, but I'll end the rambling here. I wanted to go into more detail and continue some of what I was talking about above, but didn't want to make this a "too long, didn't read" casualty. Everything from my personal experiences that I hope will help others in their quest to the age of reason, my views on parts of the bible and views of others, to humorous rants that I used to frequently do in my blogs.I'll absolutely continue and expand on my thoughts above too. I also will cover political issues as well, being that it's my career field and passion. Please don't hesitate to pass this on, to question or reach out to me if you need to talk. Please leave comments and feedback, I'd love to hear from you. I'll be back soon with more thoughts and I hope you come back too.
Secularly yours,
The Heretic
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