Having not updated in a loooong time, I have been feeling the urge lately to try to get some of the many chaotic thoughts churning in my brain. I then saw this video and thought I would share it here – hopefully you find it interesting and thought provoking.

I will write more soon…

Lonely

Lonely

Do you know what I saw?

Two people obviously in love, discussing their future. They talked of getting married, having children etc. In fact, they are both Christians who regularly attend church (and are completely accepted by their congregation…), and thus ahead of me. (Which is worse, do you think, to the hard-core fundamentalist: Atheism or Lesbianism?)

More striking, to me at least, was what I DID NOT see:

I did not see two women or two lesbians or two deviants trying to destroy  ”traditional family values”.

Our lives are brief, and can be filled with such sadness and loss. I get very mad when people in this world decide that they do not like the way that someone else is trying to live their life. Rather than “live and let live”, these bigots (I think an appropriate term) go out of their way to harass, attack and legislate behavior they deem appropriate.

It is far worse in the USA, but I have a feeling that there is an undercurrent of anti-homosexual behavior here in Canada. Please, let people be who they are, be with whom they want, and try to find some joy and happiness in this world.

My three cents…

Lonely

I am struggling with my anonymity. I am so fearful of revealing my non-belief to my family and friends, yet at the same time I want to scream it from the rooftops. It is very difficult, living a split life. How will my family and friends (mostly my family) react to me? Will they be understanding, or will I be shunned. I recently spent a couple of days camping with my siblings and their spouses, and there was a lot of talk about God and church et. al. I just sat there and let it happen. I am not confrontational enough to want to debate them, but I am so curious to know what they would think of me if they knew?

As well, one of the pastors at our church phoned me today to see how we were doing. He is a nice guy and I enjoyed the chat, but it hammered home to me that I am essentially living a lie…

Part of me just wants to write an open letter to family and friends and post it here, on my other blog and put links on my Facebook page and see what happens. I am not sure if that is the tactful thing to do or not…

I am not even sure why I want to tell people about my non-belief. I guess it is mostly because it is who I am now. I do not want to throw anything in anyone’s faces, but I would like to be able to discuss things. I do not know. This is the uncertainty I am struggling with.

I wish I had more insightful things to say, but I do not…

Lonely

There are many times in the church (I am discussing the Christian churches that I have grown up in and am familiar with…) when people are ill/injured/etc and ask for healing, or they are thankful for the prayers and healing that God has granted them and theirs. I have heard many people thank God for the healing, but rarely are the skilled medical professionals actually involved in their care thanked (I am not saying everyone does this, I am recounting what I have observed). Two occasions come to mind. A friend was in another country on a preliminary visit for mission work. She became quite ill and there were many requests for prayer and much rejoicing and thanking God when she got better. My problem with this is that she spent several weeks in hospital, where she was tended by doctors and nurses. She was on antibiotics, intravenous nutrition etc. Medical science seemed to be what helped her.

There have been several prominent cases in the media where parents of various religious sects withheld medical treatment from ill children due to religious belief. Some of the children died. In another case (Here in BC, involving premature babies, Jehovah’s Witnesses and blood transfusions) the government intervened and took away the children away from the parents in order to treat the babies. It seems that it is the medical science that is providing the treatment, not God.

It just bothers me when people ignore the hard work of skilled professionals who try their best everyday to heal people using techniques that have been tested and found effective, and give the glory alone to an unseen father in the sky (rarely is it ever a mother figure – which would make far more sense from the creation and life-giving side of things).

Sorry again for the disorganized thoughts…

lonely

I do not think enough believers critically exam this important question. There are many people that believe in God/god/gods (for brevity’s sake I will hereafter use god to mean God/god/gods and she as the generic pronoun, just to be different) just as fervently and sincerely as I did. There are Muslims who believe absolutely in Allah, Christians who worship Jesus, Hindus who make offerings to Ganesh (please do not offer my god a peanut) and Scientologists who desperately wish to remove the Thetans from their body. All of them believe they are right and the others are wrong. How do they (how did I?) know?

I think that this is a very important point. Let us say that god does exist. Which god is she? Is she Vishnu, Allah (I have probably just made someone’s hit list for referring to Allah as feminine, and no, I am not kidding) or Krishna? Who says that the one billion plus Christians out there are actually correct? What if all of the modern religions are wrong and it was the Greeks that had it right? Perhaps Zeus and Hera are sitting on Mount Olympus (which is the tallest volcano in the solar system, located on Mars) fuming that the puny mortals have turned their pitiful human backs on their gods?

With so many gods out there, it is hard to come up with a reasonable answer as to which god is THE god. Law of Parsimony: which theory has the fewest assumptions/pathways? There is no god, or that there are a great many gods all competing for our worship, or there is  one god and we humans have screwed it up royally?

Here is something else to think about: geographic region matters greatly: you are far more likely to be raised in the religion of your family and the area you live in. Most Hindus are from India. The Jews originated in Palestine and Islam came from the middle east. It is no accident that religions and gods are regional, especially if they are constructs of human culture and psyche…

There is the idea of universalism (if this is the correct term…) – the idea that all religions and gods are pointing to one, universal god; in other words Allah = Jehovah = Shiva = Yahweh = Apollo. If this is the case, than all religions need to stop fighting and start working together in order to clean up this planet… Somehow I doubt greatly that a fervent Muslim would concede that Allah is the same god as the Hebrew Yahweh.

So I ask again to conclude: How do you know which god is the correct one?

lonely

I finally came out of my atheist closet – more or less. I have only come out to one person, and he was already wise to me (he is rather intelligent, or at least is good at pretending to be). He is one of my good friends I knew in my university days, and he is one of the people I wanted to tell right away when I realised that I no longer believed in God, but was too fearful to do it. He also lives far away and it is hard to talk about something of this magnitude in a Google chat window.

I like to post on his blog (in my non-anonymous form) for he is a good writer and has many interesting posts about theology, life, etcetera and he has many followers. I like to add my 33 cents worth, especially to give balance to some of the discussions. He up and asked me (via a Facebook message) if the comments I was making about science, atheism et al were just for balance, or if I truly believed them. I could not lie, so I sent him an email telling him that I no longer believed in God. It is funny that I mention not being able to lie, as I remember a time a few years ago that he and I were chatting about life, the universe, everything and he  asked me if “I still believed in God…” I felt quite guilty because I said yes, even thought that was during a time I was wrestling with my doubts, and leaning towards disbelief. So I definitely could not lie to him a second time (Sorry for lying…). I also sent him a link (the first person I have actually directly told about this little corner of my mind) to this blog, which I hope he will read.

It felt good being able to tell someone (other than my wife) about what I believe/disbelieve. Hopefully we can have some interesting discussions and I realise now that my fear was unfounded, as he probably is fairly level-headed and would not discard someone as a friend over something like belief…

So another person knows about my disbelief. Of my 109 Facebook friends, he is the third (I just remembered that someone else knows… a story I can recount later) to know of my atheism. Three down, 106 to go (most of my family is on FB…).

lonely