Thursday, April 03, 2014

Random religion rant

I stepped into a tired, circular conversation about the existence of God online. This is what I had to say about it.

You know, I've spent many an hour pondering the big mysteries, on whether we have a creator or not, about whether there is a life after this one, and so on. This is what I've most recently concluded: I don't care.

How the universe came to be is fun to think about, sure, but now that it's here, it doesn't really matter. I think there might be some kind of divine power beyond our understanding, and even some form of life after death, but neither of those things have too much bearing on this life and this world. All a person should need to live this life well is the understanding that what they do affects other people, and their lives are no less important than your own.

Those big questions don't have much effect on this world. What does is the distance people will go to and the depths they'll sink to in order to rationalize their most hard-fought deeply-ingrained beliefs. If beliefs were valued simply as ideas like they should be, they could be shared more freely and with a lot less grief. What's more, if people didn't cherish their own beliefs so much more than the next person's, maybe they wouldn't be so slow to empathize with and respect them.

All that's required to commit an evil act is to diminish someone enough to convince yourself that hurting them is acceptable. If you don't respect their ideas, that's very easy to do.

My point is, have fun thinking and talking about the possibilities, just don't take it too seriously. We've all got to die someday. Until then, we should try to be tolerable to be around.

That's it. Thanks for reading, and thanks even more for listening. Peace and love, Internetizens.

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