The Ramblings of a "Mad Man"

Due to my grandparents taking me to church at a young age and listening to the “End of Days” or revelations sermon, I was tainted to Christianity at a very young age. I knew that I would never agree with a man who says I am a sinner and should repent and then asks me for money. I found it deeply and profoundly hypocritical since most of the people there were of modest means, my family included. I pretty much eliminated church from my life shortly thereafter except for the occasional Christmas ceremony that my mother would drag me to kicking and screaming. Even that ended after I left for college.

As I grew older I watched the Waco tragedy, I watched the Israeli conflict and I studied history. I could only conclude that all organized religions were hypocritical at their core and could not bring myself to accept any of them albeit not from a lack of trying. I met a girl in high school who was deeply religious and I was religiously in love with her, so for a time I did everything in my power to believe. I even thought I had it for awhile. It didn’t stick. My logical mind would not allow it and maybe to my detriment. I did always wonder if I was a religious person, would I still suffer so much from anxiety? I will never know, but judging by my fellow anxiety sufferers, I think anxiety doesn’t discriminate.

I do have a great deal of respect for people with faith. I think faith takes a lot of guts. Blind faith scares me. People who believe that the world was created in 7 days and is only a few thousand years old legitimately scare me. I had a priest try to tell me once that dinosaurs were put in the earth to test our faith and were actually created with the earth in seven days. Needless to say I wrote this man off as crazy and never stepped foot into that church again. I can get into a person who can reconcile his/her faith with science. I have a good friend who was able to take his faith and make it fit his rational of science. He said, what if God created the earth in 7 days, but the time scale was different. After all, can we really assume that God works on a time scale that we invented long after he created the earth. And even if he did create the earth, it would be tough to measure the day until the sun was created and the earth was in perfect revolution. He was able to take his faith and stretch it to meld with his scientific background and I can respect that.

I personally believe that God is an answer to the unknowable. God was created by people out of fear. God always exists at the edge of human understanding and picks up where science and logic can not go. I think that was pretty much by design. Humans have always feared what they don’t understand. It is perfectly normal, but to create a God to answer the unanswerable is probably a doomed philosophy. The problem now is that the religion is now as strong as science and logic and it can legitimately impede scientific progress for the sake of religion. To me that is absolute heresy at its best.

Here is a good question that people fear to the core. “What happens when we die?” This fear consumes almost everyone. We all would love to believe in the proverbial golden gates and joy at infinitum, however what if there is nothing? If there is nothing then a whole life would have been wasted trying to live up to some fictional character’s standards. And of course there is all that money spent for tutelage by your fellow man with a direct link to God.

Since I have thought about this quite a bit and feel that there is a likelihood that when we die it is simply, lights out, I have decided to live my life as if it is my last. I plan on enjoying myself to the fullest within the confound of a single rule. Thou shall not steal. Theft seems to be the only true crime. Every crime can be reduced to theft. Murder (stealing a life), rape (stealing a woman’s pride and respect), even cheating on a spouse (stealing a person’s trust and respect and another person’s wife). It all works out, trust me. As long as you don’t steal, and live your life to the fullest, if there is a pearly gate, the you had better be admitted, right? Seems fair. I hope our God is an awesome God if that time comes.

OE