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There was a funny anecdote that floated around my community several years ago.

I’m sure you’ve heard the expression, “Jesus will save you.” Well, many of the kids went to the community church and they often heard that expression. But they changed that expression to: “Jesus won’t save you, but Ron will.”

Who is Ron?

Ron is the caretaker, handyman, engineer and protector of the community. He repairs the pool, does the painting, and makes sure the pool water is the right ph balance. He knows about chemistry, mechanics, engineering and can fix about anything. He breaks up fights and settles arguments. He’s a helpful man but he won’t put up with any bullshit, either. He’s got a rough side too and he’ll step in if something doesn’t look right. He's barrel-chested and strong. He’s not someone you’d want to fight, because he’d definitely win. He’s exactly the kind of man you’d want as a neighbor. He’ll get scrappy if required and he is an honest man, too.

“Jesus won’t save you, but Ron will” pretty much says everything I think about religion.

Isaac Asimov expresses perfectly what I’ve been meaning to say for years:

"I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I’ve been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn’t have. Somehow it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I’m a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally I am an atheist. I don’t have the evidence to prove that God doesn’t exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn’t that I don’t want to waste my time."

When someone asks me what religion I am, I now answer, “the unknown”.

I usually attempt to steer clear of labels because labels create generalized misconceptions. But if I had to say a concrete answer, I would say that I am an atheist. It’s taken me my entire life to have enough confidence to say that since I was raised in an intentional Christian community and I am literally surrounded by Christians everywhere I go. They tend to think quite poorly of atheists. They are rather aggressive when it comes to trying to convert others and in my travels around the world, Christians, were the ones who were always trying to convert me. I forgive them, though.

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Even though I was raised in a Christian community my parents made the decision to let us decide for ourselves what religion we liked best.

For this reason, I always had an open mind and I was encouraged to explore my natural curiosity as a child. They never forced me to go to church, and even though the Christian adults and children in my community repeatedly told me that I was “going to go to hell,” my parents loved me unconditionally and supported my various paths in life, placing no demands on me to decide on a religion.

My mother was a rebel in many ways and in her mid thirties, she abandoned the RLDS religion that had been forced upon her as a child. She began questioning her beliefs and came to the conclusion that much of what she had been taught was not based in reality and it was definitely not useful to her life. It was at this time that she decided to let us be free to decide our own religious path.

Here are the main benefits of being an atheist as experienced in my life so far:

I don’t judge people based on their religious affiliation.

By me not being attached to one particular religion, I am quite tolerant of others’ religious choices. Wars are started because of religious intolerance. If there were more atheists, such wars wouldn’t likely exist because of religious differences. They would likely exist for different reasons, but religion wouldn’t be one of them.

I have friends who are Mormon, Muslim, Catholic, Mennonite, Sikh, Buddhist, Redneck, Nihilist, etc. As long as my friends respect my decision to remain atheist and don’t try to convert me, we remain friends. I have had a few of my Christian friends try repeatedly to convert me, and that’s when I draw a line in the sand. Basically, it comes down to respect. If they respect me as a friend, they don’t use their energy trying to convert me to their religion. If they do try to convert me, usually, our friendship becomes an acquaintanceship. I am tolerant of them, but many are not tolerant of me. Interestingly, I only have had this problem with Christians. That’s probably because they are more numerous where I am. Being an atheist has allowed me to get to know people of all different kinds of faiths and opened my eyes to the similarities that exist among different people.

Being an atheist has allowed me to focus on taking responsibility for my own actions in life and improve the way I live and treat others.

Bjork says it most eloquently,

“If I get into trouble, there’s no God or Allah to sort me out. I have to do it myself."

Many religious people use their religion as a way to avoid answering the really difficult questions in life. Many religions are used in the same way drugs are used: to mask pain, avoid reality, induce docility and shirk personal responsibility.

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Most adults are uncomfortable with the unknown and simply don’t make it a priority to investigate unknown things in life. Most adults, especially those in industrialized societies are too short of time and are over-stressed. I know because I used to be one of them. Working in survival mode doesn’t allow much time for thinking, questioning and reasoning.

I don’t believe in any afterlife, and so I live life as if this is all I have.

I have to make the most of it. I have to be truthful, even if people don’t want to hear it. Even if I don’t care to hear it. My conscience is greater than the forces that wish me to be quiet. I will never stop trying to uncover the unknown and I will never stop seeking out the “shapes of the happiness no one escapes.”

Starting from childhood, I was allowed to exercise my natural curiosity to peel back the layers of unknown worlds.

Marie Curie perhaps says it best:

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”

I was never indoctrinated with any religious system, therefore I was able to cultivate my natural curiosity at a young age without any fear of a heavy-handed “God”.

By allowing a child to discover and question things in the world without fear, critical thinking skills develop naturally. This also allows a child to become more autonomous and more resistant to brainwashing and other forms of manipulation. This enables a child to seek truth independently and to hold everyone up to the same light, including authority figures.

When parents feed their children religious beliefs, they are actually doing them a disservice in two distinct ways:

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1. They are giving them answers (usually incorrect ones) instead of letting them discover them on their own.
2. They are programming their minds with information that will most likely be in need of de-programming at a later date.

It’s best not to program children with your religious beliefs, but rather let them sort it all out for themselves. They will end up doing this later on as adults anyway, so why bother filling them with religious dogma that will need to be cleaned out later anyway? It makes very little sense.

This does not mean that children should not be given guidance. On the contrary, the best thing a parent can do is become an example of how to live in a way that is not harmful to others but is respectful to oneself. I have noticed as a parent that my child will often just model behaviors. If I sit down and decide to paint, it will not be long before my child sits down to paint, too. If I spend every waking moment on my iPhone, my child will also do the same.

Being a parent is the most difficult thing a person could ever decide to do because a mirror of ourselves is there to remind us of our weaknesses, shortcomings and issues.

But that same mirror also reminds us how to love, be nice and give unconditionally without greed. I have my issues, my struggles that my child reminds me of. But I think my child does make me more aware of the purpose of life. It is up to me, though, to act upon the feedback of the mirror.

Final Thoughts

If every person on the planet had been forced to become a devout, docile follower of an existing religion, then the main religions of the world would not even exist. To create something new that has never existed before, one must reject much of what one has been taught and carve out a brand-new path based on independent thought and experience.

Go out and read all the religious texts if you must. But then reject most of it, keep what makes sense and create a new religion if you must have some kind of juju beans in your pocket. But I don’t advise anyone to blindly follow a pre-existing dogma that was created by someone else thousands of years ago.

Creating is way more fun than following.

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Stephen Hawking:

“Before we understood science, it was natural to believe that God created the universe, but now science offers a more convincing explanation.”

Quotes came from: http://www.michaelnugent.com/best/famous-atheists/

This post was not written by AI. It was human-created on Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2016.