Coming Out of the Closet

No this is not what you're thinking, this is about religion and God. I am turning 70 this year, am retired, accountable to no one, and no longer need to lay low about my beliefs. If you are very devout, you may not want to read this. Not for any reason other than if you have just one iota of doubt about your faith, it might be upsetting.

One thing about my DNA is that I have always been a very skeptical person. In order for me to believe something I have to either see it, or its proof. Probably the one event in my life that profoundly reinforced my skepticism was when I found out the whole Christmas Santa Claus thing was a ruse last year, (ha ha, ok, I was six years old). No, it did not traumatize me in any way. What it did was that I resolved never to be fooled like that again. When I attended church I noticed the similarity between religion and Santa Claus. They are both based upon the reward system. If you are a good boy/girl you'll get presents, and if bad you'll get coal. With religion if you're good you go to heaven and if you're bad you go to hell. But worse, if you're good but dont believe in God then most say God will send you to hell. You would think a perfect supreme being would prioritize being good over worship. Then there's the whole free will thing, which I lean towards there being no free will (thats a whole other subject). So if you are born with 'bad guy DNA', you will do bad things, so do you then go to hell even though you never had a chance? What about other civilizations in the universe? You do realize there are trillions of stars and they all have planets whizzing around them. Do they get their own prophet sent by God to save them too? And how come here on planet Earth, we can't even agree on the same God and prophet?  You would think God would make a brief appearance and say 'Hey its me, I'm the real God and this dude here is the real prophet, so stop fighting like a bunch of children, and to prove it I'm going to give every man woman and child on Earth an anchovy pizza tomorrow at 12pm (Greenwich Time) and if you dont like anchovies, tough cookies, I like them.' I am waiting for my pizza.

My family was Catholic (sort of) and I went to a Catholic high school. Growing up I did attend church many times, mostly at the Catholic school. I had ample opportunity to be a believer. The thing I noticed is that religion is 100% FAITH BASED. There is ZERO PROOF that any of it is true. Its all about faith. I know many people have had faith based religious experiences that anchor their belief, but I haven't.  I do agree with the morality and 'be a good person' aspect of religion and I have tried to adhere to that. If you look at the universe in general there is no morality component. Clearly it is a human created concept. Just as you can wipe out an ant colony in your yard, the universe can fry the Earth in one second by a lot of things like an asteroid, comet, supernova, gamma ray burst or swallowed up by a black hole. All it takes is one star to pass near our solar system and fling all the planets out of their orbits into the void of space and we freeze to death. Scary thought. It can happen. It has happened many times to other planetary systems. The universe clearly cares nothing about what's right or wrong.

To my devout friends, I mean no disrespect and do not in any way look down to you. In fact I am glad you find comfort in your religion. You probably feel sorry for me because I dont believe in an after life. But I in turn feel sorry for you because you live your life now around getting rewarded in an after life that I am pretty sure will not happen. I think the after life will be like the before life, remember how it was before you were born? If I am right about no after life then you were fooled Sant Claus style all your life, if I am not then I'm betting God will be nice to me because I was a nice person. I live to enjoy EACH PRECIOUS MOMENT NOW BECAUSE I THINK ITS ALL WE HAVE. If there's one thing I've learned, its that nothing is forever, not even the universe, which will go dark once all the stars run out of fuel. The most precious thing we have is the present. Enjoy it while you can.

Religion (or lack thereof) is a touchy subject and thats why I never came out of the closet officially till now. Historically speaking, many have died over disagreements about religion. Respectfully I remain your friends regardless of your beliefs and hope you extend the same to me.