Tag: inspirational

Religion, and other ramblings

I had a long, and lengthy, discussion with a friend of mine on the topic of religion and beliefs. For the longest time, I thought of myself as a pagan. Then, when belief failed me, I turned to atheism. Now, I am not so sure what to call myself. I cannot say there is nothing out there, but I cannot definitively say something is out there either. I simply do not know.

What I can say with certainty is there is much to this world that we still do not understand.

I believe gods were created out of necessity. People needed something to put their faith in to believe that everything would be okay. This could be anything from the weather patterns, food, fertility, even death. Every culture, every people that has walked this earth, has held some form of  belief. By the time Christianity was conceived, tens of thousands of cultures had been long dead, and with them their gods died as well.

We must then choose to belief that there is something, or there is nothing. Furthermore, we must then decide who is right, and who is wrong. But what if the truth was no one was completely right, and no one is completely wrong?

I am of the belief that true faith comes from acknowledging the fact that we simply do not know. We can strive to find answers, but ultimately, we just do not know. We want to be right so badly that we sometimes miss the fact that answers can lie in unsuspecting places. Religion does not explain everything, and science does not explain everything. If you were to put the two together, however, you get more answers, and the divide between people is thinned. If you acknowledge that answers can lie within multiple religions rather than just one, more answers are presented.

I do not believe in absolutes. Nothing is absolutely bad, and nothing is absolutely good. Nothing is absolutely correct, or absolutely wrong. Bad can have good intentions, and with bad comes lessons. Good can have bad intentions, and good can also have its own set of lessons. While we argue incessantly over who is right and who is wrong, we are missing the biggest picture of them all; we are all human beings sharing an earth together, and our bickering is leading to our own demise.

Religion, and even a lack thereof, has led to countless centuries of bloodshed. Our earth is covered in gallons of blood from fallen warriors willing to die for what they believed to be correct, and its the age old chess match. There is no winner when there is death. The biggest armies does not mean one is more correct than another. A religion with a massive following is no better than a smaller following. The number of followers does not dictate the level of faith a group of people may possess. The only thing numbers provide is a larger army from which wars can begin, and how history will remember the fallen.

Going back to a point I made earlier within this post, I believe gods were created from faith, and that faith came from necessity. As people moved from land to land, they took their gods with them. The people changed, evolved, and the gods were forced to do the same. That is why we see so many who call themselves by the same name, yet believe so differently. This is why we see so many beliefs that are similar to other religious beliefs from countries we’ve never visited.  What I see now, however, is stagnation. The world, like it or not, is constantly evolving. New gods are being created out of necessity, new beliefs are forming from necessity, yet people cling so dearly to the old ways they have always known. This is not the way the universe is supposed to work. This is not to say, of course, that we should completely abandon the “old ways”, but we should not stay stuck in them. If we remained stuck, you would not be sitting at your computer, or holding your phone, reading these words while constructing your responses. We must learn from the old ways, and bring the old into the new. We must take the lessons we’ve been given, but continue to move forward. We will be ancient history one day. Our future generations will look back on this generation in disgust, as we look back on certain aspects of our ancestors, and wonder “How could people sit by and allow this to happen?” Stagnation.

There must be a balance, a harmony. The longer we continue to allow ourselves to be divided, the more we see the world being destroyed. Soon, there will be no one to argue with of right and wrong, because there will be no one left to have an opinion.

I do not believe faith comes from a book written by men. In fact, I believe religious texts are one of the poisons of our society. A book that teaches people how to live can easily be rewritten, or mistranslated, to sway the public opinion. We have seen the evidence of this, in fact, with the changes made to the bible over time. Faith comes from within, belief comes from within, and we create our gods out of necessity. Each person serves a purpose, and therefore we must also accept that “bad” people also serve a purpose. With the recent popularity in Ted Bundy, I’ll use him as an example. Ted Bundy did terrible things, but from those terrible things, we got a unique insight into the way the mind of a serial killer functions. We have a better understanding of just how terrible the human mind can be, and we saw warning signs. We bettered our understanding of the evolution of a serial killer, While we focus on the acts done by the man, we also looked at the victims. Each death gives us more answers about the human body, the human vessel. Each day we continue to move forward and learn, and that is the way we are supposed to be. We are supposed to move forward and learn more so that we may have stronger beliefs in the capability of mankind.

From all the negative things that have happened, good has come out of them. Every experience shapes who we are as people. While some events have a bigger impact than others, we cannot point fingers and continue to hate one group or the other. Instead, we take the information, good and bad, and we learn from it. The situations thrown upon us are up to us to decide how we are going to react to them. Bad can be changed to good.

Perhaps I’m getting a bit rambling, and perhaps I’m even not making sense now. I honestly cannot tell. I can only hope these words make sense to someone out there. I wish these words could help the progression by helping people realize the importance of accepting change, of accepting progression, of accepting we do not know everything, and accepting that absolutes simply don’t exist. No one is right, no one is wrong, no one is bad, no one is good all the time. It is simply impossible. Change, evolution of ourselves, however, is very possible, if we’d simply allow it to happen.

Hectic days

It has been a long couple of days, my dear friends and readers. While waiting to pick up my daughter, I was struck with the sudden urge to speak about it. On Friday my grandfather went into the hospital, and I found out by means of Facebook. I immediately was thrown into an unnecessary battle with a so called friend, and I felt utterly betrayed by someone who claims to be my best friend. Between hardly sleeping, and rushing around trying to visit my grandfather, I’ve hardly had a chance to stop, let alone think. But I did realize a number of different things over the course of the past few days:

1). Take advantage of what time you are given, as nothing is guaranteed.

2). In the face of tragedy, your true friends will show themselves, while the wolves shed their skins and give up the facade of being loyal.

3). Be careful to give your trust to the right people, and avoid the wrong ones.

4). There is great value to simply sitting and listening to someone. It may seem small to us, but to the speaker, it may be the equivalent of opening their soul to you.

5). I don’t know what I would do if I lost my grandfather. For years I’ve battled my own demons, and didn’t visit as often as I should have for my own reasons. When I heard he was in the hospital, I realized how foolish my strange despise was, not towards him but to those around him, and vowed to be at his side whenever possible.

Today he was moved from ICU to a regular room, and we were over joyed. His doctor wants him home by Valentines day, which is romantic lol. But I knelt by his bed, held his hand, and even with a room full of people we talked, just the two of us. I don’t know if he had always intimidated me, or if it was my own fear of not knowing what to say, but I learned today that it didn’t matter. Sometimes it’s just about being there and holding their hand. Words are important, they have power. I believe, however, that the true power lies within what is unspoken, and in your actions. It’s like the old saying goes: Actions speak louder than words. I know now just how true that is.

Another very important moment came to me earlier, and I completely forgot to mention it. But now that I am at a computer rather than updating via phone, I’ll post about it. My grandfather started out in life being not a very religious person, but as he grew up and things began changing in his life, he accepted the Lord into his heart and converted to Christianity. He’s been a man of God and, as he says “has tried to do best by the Lord since.” Now, those of you who know me are well aware of the fact that I am not Christian. I haven’t been for years. So imagine my guilt and distress when he told me to give all of my troubles to the Lord. I spent the rest of the night questioning myself, my religious choices, which is something I’ve not done in years. He doesn’t know of my personal choices, and I am sure you can gather why.

As I lay in bed later that night, thinking over the conversation we’d had that literally had me in tears, I had a strange epiphany. I have my own set of gods, and deities. It may not be “God” or “Jesus” in the Christian sense of the word, but I believe in a higher being. I can still take his advice to heart without crossing my own beliefs. I felt such relief when I realized this, though looking back I should have known that from the start. And watching my grandfather battle through this, my faith is restored. I cannot tell you if there is a God, I cannot tell you if Jesus really did walk the earth. I don’t know which religion is right, which one is wrong, or anything such as that. What I can tell you is there is obviously something out there. Some higher being. Perhaps it doesn’t even have a name. But something is watching over my grandfather right now, and something will be bringing him home soon. And I am thankful for that.