I was born and raised Catholic but honestly never for a moment really believed. I remember sitting in church, as young as 8, listening to the sermon and thinking, "that sounds like some bull shit." As I grew older I grew smarter and picked and chose the areas that I thought were realistic for my faith. I realized most of my beef was believing that Jesus was a messiah and that he supposedly performed numerous miracles as recanted in the bible. I don't want to take anything away from Jesus I'm sure he did a lot of great stuff for some people in great need, but the son of god? Walking on water? Feeding thousands from one little bread loaf basket? Come. On. Honestly my faith was simple and straight forward. I believed in religion in the sense that its good to be a good person so don't sin or some dude in a white beard is going to smite you upon the very land you stand and then you burn in the fiery depths of hell for eternity.
Fast forward a few more years and I'm in college smoking a lot of weed and attending philosophy, and religious study classes at my local community college. This was good for me. Learning about different religions from around the world and then heading to a class that questions every single thought and every bit that makes you the beings that we are. Oh and I was super baked. That combined with my social crisis of not understanding where or how I fit into society became a melting pot for inner exploration and creation. I spent a lot of time thinking about those classes and what I learned about all these other religions and how to see the big picture. For years I really just enjoyed seeing how both similar and in some ways different all our religions really are but the fault that I had come to realize is we ignorantly believe instead of believing because we truly know for ourselves that this is best for us. That is not to say that everyone has no idea what the meaning of their religion truly is. It just means there are a lot of people who just believe because they are told to, which was exactly my situation for most of my young adult life.
I am now 25 years old and I've decided what I believe, and its much different than what you would expect a young affluent catholic boy, raised in the Chicago suburbs would come to believe.
There is no "God" or at least not a god that looks like us. No Buddha, No Abraham, No Allah. I mean they might exist as spiritual beings but they are not "God" or the "Creator." Our Creator or God was something way more significantly powerful than we could ever fathom. It didn't move through time and space like us it didn't look or function like us its thoughts were never even close to the same as ours and it probably functioned in thousands of different dimensions... we live in 3... It was truly an inexplicable IT. One day IT decided to explode and spread all of its pieces to the edges of our universe and even into other universes. Over trillions of years of explosions and collisions and orbits of small habitable planets with single celled organisms and then more collisions and explosions and through billions and trillions of years of this chaotic expansion lands... Earth. On Earth life grows and restarts continuously. In fact Earth itself has taken 4.5 billion to create its best and smartest creation of all... US. What does this all mean and what the fuck am I getting at?
It means we are all pieces of that divine creator/god; it means that given the right environment and the proper faith in ourselves, not someone else, is how you get that much closer to that divinity. When those pieces start coming together in the right places and connect we get even closer to achieving that Utopia that initial perfect being that we came from. Our achievements here on earth are nothing short of miracles. Our manipulation of our environment around us is nothing short of godly. When we harmoniously live within the means of our environment and use our powers, skills and mastery of manipulation in the world around us you see how it flourishes. We display works of god here in our world everyday. But when we try and throw puzzle pieces out and dismiss them we leave holes in our earth and our environment. It puts stress and strain on everything and we see the evil in our forgotten pieces.
Our forgotten pieces are people, animals, contaminated land, the list could go miles and miles long.
So what? What's your fuckin' point Connor? You babbled on about all this kumbaya hippy shit do you really expect me to believe in that?
No
Just believe in whatever empowers you.