Saintaholic said

I told myself I would not come back to this thread, but I can't help myself after reading through it all last night.

Not sure why I feel the need to qualify this once again, but for the record, after growing up in the Catholic Church and Catholic school in my youth, I now consider myself Agnostic. Some may say that that's the cop-out view, but I am among many that are of the belief that there's a chance that there is a God, but are also not going to blindly follow one just because everyone else does or because my grandparents did. It is easy for us to believe in a god blessing us, living in our current conditions in this flawed, but otherwise great country. What about the starving people in Africa? What about the babies being killed around the globe? What about the 7-year old forced to live under the I-10 bridge? Has God just decided he does not like them?

Do I believe firm believers are wrong? No. Do I believe atheists are wrong? No. I believe that neither side can definitively state anything, no matter what they convince themselves of or what their ancestors have passed-on to them.

Do I believe a man named Jesus (or something like that) once walked the Earth proclaiming to be God? Probably. Does that necessarily mean he was God? Probably not.

I'm not willing to bank my time and energy on a story from the opposite side of the world, at a period of time when people weren't very sophisticated at all to the point where they were nailing people to crosses, to believe that someone was God in the flesh just because people from 2000+ years ago believed it. What if Jesus was a master illusionist and the biggest con in human history? What if this is a simple, middle eastern fable that just happened to get bigger and bigger as it passed from generation to generation? What if "the Resurrection" was hoax, perpetrated by his closest followers? What if he truly was never dead in the first place? I'm not saying that's what I firmly believe, but those are questions I have as a man, and based on the laws of physics/science that I know, at least one of the handful of questions I just posed are more likely to be accurate than not.

To me, there's probably a better chance than not that humans are not as special as we believe we are. The moment we find life elsewhere in space is the moment we realize we're not and that this entire universe isn't all about us or for us (I believe this event will happen either in our lifetime or in my children's lifetime). There's more scientific evidence than not that we aren't special. Knowing what we know now, which was not known 2000+ years ago - that we're one of several hundred billion planets, located in one galaxy among a couple of trillion galaxies throughout the known universe, most of which with billions of planets of their own - it is incredibly statistically improbable that we're alone...and if we aren't alone, then what?

In regards to the church specifically - there's so many of them. Who is to say one church is wrong and the other is right? Obviously they all cannot be right. Am I supposed to believe Christianity is right just because I live in America and because that's what my grandparents and great grandparents believed in? To me, people believe in what they believe in because they psychologically NEED it. The scariest thing for the human race to learn is that they aren't special or that this world isn't all about them. It's a bit of an egotistical, downright arrogant flaw of ours. We inherently need to feel important.

To me, there's a better chance than not that church is something that was created thousands of years ago for a host of different reasons, chief among them -

• A way to control the masses via a threat of harm from a higher power, a threat that cannot be proven right now, but conveniently, in the "afterlife"
• To help us cope with loved ones that pass away, giving us peace of mind that "they're now in a better place"
• To help us cope with the thought of our own death, giving us peace of mind that heaven awaits us so we can live forever
• Money (more so an issue with modern-day churches)
• To give us peace of mind that someone is watching over us and our loved ones at all times
• Social time, gives people something to do with others, especially older people who may not get much social interaction outside of their Sunday church services
• To give us someone to blame ("the Devil") when we make bad decisions in our life
• To give us peace of mind that we're not alone in this grand universe, which at the time churches and religions were started, no one truly understood the vastness of our universe. Heck, back then, many people thought that are our planet was essentially the entire world.
• And lastly, to give ourselves a sense of purpose. "Since we're smart, have intelligent brains, are self-aware, and all the animals around us aren't, this entire thing has to be all about us, right?"

I would ask someone to prove to me that anything I stated above is not true, but I know that that's not possible. Just like if I were a firm believer and my entire post was a church sermon quoting bible verses, and someone asked me to prove what I said was true, I would not be able to.

That's why I conclude, as I stated yesterday, to each his own. Believe in what you believe in, but please don't tell me or others that we are damned to burn in hell for eternity or that their "head will be cut off" just because we don't believe in the same thing you believe in.

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