Religion: A Touchy Subject

Hi all,

I'm quite enjoying the blog sessions now. Kinda lets me extract my thoughts and allows me to reflect on what I've been doing.

I may have mentioned this already, but I'm an Atheist. To class myself as an Atheist does not mean that I believe in particular things. It merely means that I do not believe in any form of a deity. Many people seem to think of atheism in terms of a religion; that all atheists believe in the big bang, and all atheists live in the same way etc. Perhaps it is merely our human instinct to classify people so bluntly and with such ignorance. Perhaps it's for the better, especially when dealing with large groups of people. Everyone thinks differently, so for one person to control many people, they need a way in which they can understand people on their own level; a way of summarising, for if they were to consider each person individually then they'd be hesitating on decisions for decades.

I guess I've been a proclaimed atheist for about a year now. Not to say that I was religious at any point prior in my life. I've been brought up in a Catholic Primary and Secondary School and to a Catholic Family. I'm lucky (in my opinion) that neither my family nor my schooling has shoved religion down my throat at a young age. I think that children are most susceptible to doing as they are told, and that is the danger with teaching religion to be practised. Learning about religion is absolutely acceptable - heck, I know that I'll be teaching my children about all kinds of religion, if their education facilities fail to. You see, I've been taught these things, and received the sacrament of Baptism and Holy Communion, but never actually BELIEVED in anything related to a greater entity being benevolent and omnipresent and so forth. It's actually quite embarrassing when I look back on myself performing these rituals. I only did it because I was a child following what everyone else around me were doing.

After having debates with people from other faiths, including Hinduism, Islam and non-Catholic Christian denominations, I'm always stunned by people's stubbornness to believe in ideas that they cannot explain to me rationally. It's like they don't understand why they 'believe' the ideas themselves. They just accept these ideas. Of the religions who base beliefs on texts written down, I cannot to this day (and perhaps never will) fathom why people believe almost blindly to what is in those texts. When I asked one of my classmates why his Hindu beliefs told him that he should stay away from eating garlic and/or onions, his own response really interested me. He looked bemused as he stated that he didn't know, and said he'd go and look it up. I looked it up, and apparently it's because it creates a sense of negativity in the mind, and dullness in the mood. Well, at least there's a reason, albeit an odd one.

I guess in part, the reason why most people defend their religion is because they want to maintain their own dignity, even if they know that in their rationality, their 'beliefs' are highly unjustified. But hey, that's just an Atheist's point of view. And for those of you that are religious: all Atheists think the same don't they?

Until next time.