Fight The Darkness

Me, me, me. It’ all still about me…

So I spent my older childhood, supremely confident in my views, and I was constantly surrounded by people who held what I considered to be completely irrational views on the nature of the world around us.

I’m not just talking about stupid people, either. I’m talking about bright, intelligent people. People I’d expect to grow up, go on to college, graduate and get white collar jobs and not work the truck that sucks crap out of the porta-toilets on construction sites.

No matter how many times they’d bring up some “proof” which could be easily shown to be not true, they couldn’t be shifted.

Why? I didn’t understand why.

Was the message of god so powerful and meaningful that it could transcend reality itself?

I had what could only be considered a crisis of faith. “Faith” is perhaps not quite the right word, but it is close. I had a certainty in the nature of the world that I felt could withstand any assault by the opposing side. “But…” I couldn’t help wondering, “Why do they have the same certainty? Am I, perhaps, wrong?”

So I took the plunge.

Oh, I didn’t start going to church or anything like that. I started reading. I read every religious text I could get my hands on. The Torah (“Wow, god’s a petty bastard.”), The New Testament (“So this is how cults start!”), The Koran (“Wow, god’s a right royal bastard!”), the Book or Mormon (“Seriously? People believe this isn’t a modern con game?”), the teachings of the buddha (“Umm, yeah, right.”), the creation myths of aboriginal peoples (“The Great Beaver did it!”) and any books on Theology (“So this is what people mean when they say, ‘mental masturbation’!”) and comparative religion that I could find.

…and that’s when I knew, for certain, that it was all bullshit.

Nothing in any of it dissuaded my world view that science, while imperfect, is a progressive process that advances our understanding of “how things really are” versus “how I’d like things to be.” Further, each and every religious text is an empty vessel, devoid of any real meaning. To be kind to them, they are nothing but fairy tales. To be less circumspect, they are transparent instruments of control and domination.

But that really wasn’t the jewel that came out of this exercise. I had that before I went in. What I did come away with was that, if the premise of any one of these religions was true, none of the others could be true.

If Christianity was the real path to salvation by a loving god, then 1492 years worth of native americans went to hell because god wasn’t competent enough to get his word to two entire continents. The localized nature of religions proved that the phenomena of religion is universal, but the words are man-made for political reasons, not divine inspiration.