It’s Sunday morning, a morning containing a bit of significance to me, as this morning is a morning where millions of people are told how to think and why. This fact makes me feel disconnected with society, which is an amazing feeling in and of itself. My mother is away at some spiritual retreat where they’re probably praying and saying, "Shalom" to each other a lot. My mother continues to pretend that she believes in God, despite the fact that she knows He doesn’t exist. I’ve talked to her about it. She believes there is no tangible heaven or hell. She believes that God is a spiritual metaphor for all the goodness in the world. She prays and reads books about coming to grips with spiritualism. Yet, she still calls herself a Christian. I don’t. I believe in God no more than I believe in The Force or some other fictional religion. That is, they are all beliefs that take us away from reality and give us hope. Only through beliefs do we find hope, do we find a meaning for our existance. An exsistance that, as unfortunate as it may seem, has no all encompassing meaning. The only meaning, as far as I can surmise, is a self-created meaning: to fall in love, to have children, to write a novel, to fight for civil rights, to save someone’s life, to get by on seven dollars a week. No matter what the individual meaning is, it cannot be transposed from person to person. Only through religion is that the case. A case where a preacher makes someone feel guilty for their "sins" and stresses the importance of "washing one clean" of "sins" that aren’t really sins in the first place. Lusting after a member of the opposite sex is not a sin, it’s simply an insticual reaction in wanting to keep your species alive.
I read a statistic a couple days ago that said 45% of the American population believe the world was created roughly 10,000 years ago. This amazed me. First, science has completely disproven, through carbon testing, history reading, factual evidence, that the earth is billions of years old. Second, only religious fanatics and imbeciles would buy into rejecting scientific method for a book that is constantly disproven through other accounts. Of course, the venn diagrams of religious fanatics and imbeciles tend to overlap quite often.
It’s funny how religions take simple things that they’re not quite comfortable with and pretend like their uncomfortability—scratch that: their bigotry—is somehow Godly. "If you don’t believe in God, you will go to hell." "Muslims will go to hell." "Gays will go to hell." "Jews will go to hell." "Atheists will go to hell." "Communists will go to hell." "If you have an abortion, you will go to hell." "If you wear glasses to improve your sight, you will go to hell." It’s always been my theory that if someone falls under one of these categories, he should sin all he wants because he can’t go to hell twice. The ultimate sinner is a pro-choice gay communistic atheist with jewish and muslim friends, all who wear eyeglasses. Of course, rapists, murderers, and Jerry Lewis fans are all okay so long as they repent their sins to God. I wonder if at judgement day, God will say to someone, "It says here you killed fourteen people." To which the person will reply, "Yes, but they were all Jews."
Oh wait, I forgot that there won’t be a judgement day and everyone who dies will simply cease living. That’s what dying is all about anyway—not living anymore. Kind of like the earth was 10,000 years ago—non-existant.
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