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My Religion MAG
I have a magnet on my mirror stating, “Life is not about finding yourself – life is about creating yourself.” This is the statement I live by.
Many people do not believe me when I say I am an atheist. They don’t understand that I simply do not believe in any sort of god or afterlife. I also do not believe in the devil, in angels, or in souls. I believe in myself and the strength I have gained through the help of my parents, teachers, and friends – and my own hard work.
I am not going to try to dissuade anyone from his or her own opinions either. I know that people enjoy having religion in their lives; some need their faith to help them through hard times. And some do not want the responsibility of their misfortunes weighing down on their shoulders.
I do. I abhor the idea of fate – that everything is already planned out and you have no control to change anything. If you believe in fate, when bad things happen, it is not your fault; it’s just fate. When my life is not going well, I know that it is no one’s fault but my own. When I do well in school, when I fall in love, it is not fate and we are not soul mates. I worked hard and paid attention and did the homework. My love and I simply love each other – that is all it is, and for me that is all it needs to be.
For some, life is overwhelming. How can anyone be successful and happy in such a difficult, horrible world? They need someone to help them, someone to guide them, and someone to have faith in to make sure things get better. Placing my success and happiness in another’s hands breaks my heart. I need to be successful because of my efforts. I must be responsible for my own happiness. That is what I need from my religion.
Who will ever know what the truth really is? All I know is in the same way that some have full faith and trust in God to give them hope, I need to believe I am on my own to be truly happy – for how can I create myself if I spend my entire life just looking?
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This article has 764 comments.
"Who will ever know what the truth really is?"
There's a difference between saying the truth can't be known and that, if there is truly a God, he doesn't exist. What if he does exist and you just don't know it?
My challenge to your atheism is this: where did the first speck of matter come from? Either there was nothing, and then there was something, which would cancel the laws of science that you are using as a reference point to judge everything else, or there was something eternal from which everything else sprung off, which does not violate a law of science, but rather promotes the tenets of time and space. And if there is something eternal and we have all sprung from that eternal thing, then it is also authoritative over us. While we can create our own ideas and values, we did not physically create ourselves, we are a product of scientific consistencies in the universe, but the belief that there is no eternal God rejects these consistencies.
How does atheism answer to this?
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Favorite Quote:
"The reason for your unreasonable treatment of my reason so enfeebles my reason that I have reason to complain of your reason" ~ Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Again, read Stephen Hawking's books. They should enlighten you as the how the universe can come from "nothing".
Plus I know many happy agnostics, atheists, hindus, buddhists, and even a scientologist. You don't need faith to be happy. Happiness doesn't come from faith. At the risk of sounded cliche, happiness comes from you and how you choose to perceive the world. We create our own realities.
And for the record, everything is logical.