The SBP Archives - Your less than frequent dose of SBP!

I used to consider myself as moderately religious, believing in some form of higher power, maybe from the Christian ideology or maybe not.

Now I have become much more jaded as time has passed. More harm than good has come from it. Religion is something that should be kept to yourself and not used as something to prove a point you want to make, or to claim that you're a better person than someone else. Those two sentiments have cause more pain and suffering in this world that anything else. As soon as an authority figure says, "My group is better than your group", and usually such a sentiment is based in religion, that's how wars start and blood starts to shed.

And to me it's odd that a lot of this fighting is for something that no one is 100% sure even exists. Be wary of anyone that tells you, "I know such and such God (or variant thereof) is watching" because bottom line, NOBODY KNOWS.

The only thing that makes me believe that some form of higher power exists is the complexity of nature and the universe that surrounds it. You have to look no further than the ability of our species to procreate. It starts from just one cell, and somehow it just 'knows' how to duplicate itself, where to go and what to build to 'construct' a human being. I am not sure if science can explain this form of intelligence.

I don't feel 100% comfortable labeling myself as an atheist, but at least I can admit I'm not sure what's out there, if anything at all, and I'm certainly not going to condemn those who might lean one way over the other. If believing in a religious god of some kind makes your life better, makes you a better person, how can I not be for it?

Most of the world isn't so open-minded though. And that's why I wonder if it's at all worth it.