Lack of Belief
A friend challenged my apparent lack of faith earlier this evening, causing me to really think about my opposition to “faith”. It’s worth pointing out that I have no problem with people believing whatever they want to believe – as long as they respect my freedom not to share their belief.
In the process of thinking through the various facets of my opposition to organised religion, faiths, ideologies, and so on, I ended up writing a number of observations down. I thought it might be interesting to share them here.
Here goes (gulp)…
The vast majority of people choose to believe in what we commonly term the “Judeo Christian God”, and the stories written in a collection of books hundreds of years after the events of the stories they tell.
Billions of perfectly well educated people around the world choose to believe in completely different gods, and have just as much faith in the veracity of their gods and the stories surrounding them as Christians do in theirs.
Throughout recorded history entire civilisations have come and gone that believed unflinchingly in all manner of faiths, religions, or origin stories that are now regarded as either curiosities, misguided, dangerous, incorrect, or even laughable.
Many of the most violent conflicts in recorded history have been caused by factions either promoting, or defending differing faiths.
It’s worth stating again – the above observations are entirely my own. If I thought about it some more, I could probably keep going for several pages, but that would be very tedious, and probably not worth reading at all. Anyway – my aim is not to dissuade you from believing whatever you choose to, or to question your faith, or intelligence – I’m just making a few observations that correlate with my choice not to believe.