Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Atheism vs religiousness vs science

I feel as though lately, there has been a crossroad in my life that I have seen many times. I also feel as though some people have an idea that may be wrong both about me and some groups of people in general. This crossroad is that of atheism, science, and religiousness. What do I belief is true and why?

Well from past posts and from knowing me in person, like many of you do, you would probably guess that I am an atheist who doesn't think there is a god and doesn't believe in anything but science. I will respond by saying, somewhat.

First off, I want to start by saying atheism is a very strong and decisive word that describes a small group of people. It is the belief in nothing or the lack of beliefs at all. This is a very strong and honestly, to me, meaningless (dis)belief system. It makes life so much more monotonous and pointless. I understand skepticism and debatable ideas, but I can't say that I believe in nothing. I simply don't know anything. In my mind, belief and knowledge are two separate things.

This brings me to science. Yes I am a strongly scientific person. I am a post-Scientific Revolution and post-Enlightenment thinker. I belief in reason and understanding the world around us. That is who I have decided to me. This does not mean however that I don't believe or I don't leave room for belief in other things. There very well be a god or anything other being out there controlling our actions and making me write this post right now. Who can ever really know?

This leads into the concept of religion. I don't really have a set religion and I am happy about that. I am not being forced to close my mind to things that may or may not be true. I am thinking on my own and not worrying about the problems that some most likely, but still possibly, existent god may have with it. This gives me a better chance of seeing things for what they are and not what someone tells me that someone else said that god said. I do understand that religion is a safe haven for some people. It does help them understand their life and explain some things for them. I completely understand that, and I understand that because that is exactly what science is for me. Science is in part my religion. It is pretty much my belief system. I say "in part" and "pretty much" because there are some people who take this too strongly just as some religion fanatics take religion too strongly.

There are people in this world that are too close minded and myopic. They can't see something that is right in front of their faces. They are blindly faithful to things that are obviously not possible or true to others. This goes for people of religion and people of science and people of neither. This goes for me and you and everyone you and I know. Everyone on this earth is myopic to their own degree. Now the only resolution for this is looking at someone else and attempting to understand what they believe and why they believe it. As I mentioned before though, there are people who are too close minded. These are the people who don't believe anything unless it is purely _________________ (fill in the blank with whatever belief system you wish). There are people that believe everything in the book (quran, bible, torah, brief history of time) is true no matter what. And to be honest, none of them are completely 100% true. They are all beliefs. They are all some stuff people wrote down at some point and people are fallible as we all know.

So without going too much further, moral of the story: don't believe everything you see, try to understand other people's beliefs, don't be close minded, and figure out what you really want to believe. I won't even answer the original questions because they were intended for the reader, not me. Despite my biased writing, what do you believe? And why? Hope these at least get you thinking. That is all I ask.

2 comments:

  1. Perception is our reality, Mike. The point of this was that you are tired of people shoving their opinions down everyones throat. But by telling everyone to not be closed minded and not believing everything they see, you are in a sense a preaching to your own choir. Yeah, should people be less closed minded? Sure. But remember the first thing I said. Since we all have our own perception. All of our realities differ.

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  2. Reading over this, I didn't write the best way I should have. I was tired and ready for bed and my thoughts were scrambled. My actual message was actually in there amongst a bunch of other thoughts. My apologies for the mixed messages. I will need to fix this in a future post. Hopefully when I am more conscious of what I am writing.

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