Unbelievable

I guess idle hands do often do the devil's work.

Lately, my job has entered a slow period, and I have had a lot of time to do nothing. It's fantastic. But, in my solitude, I have long-pondered this question: is it possible to be kind of an atheist? I brought it up a little in my last post, and it got me thinking a little.

I used to say I was agnostic, and that seeing was believing. I'm starting to think that being agnostic is sort of a cop-out. Like, "I just don't know about this, but that God story seems fishy." I really think that claiming to be agnostic was just me not committing to yet another aspect of life. It's a drawback of being passionless and basically dead inside. You can't even commit to not believing in something.

But I think I'm ready to take a stand here. I don't believe there is a God. I don't believe that he created the Earth, and I really don't believe that Adam and Eve crapola (because wouldn't we all be his kids somewhere, and isn't that gross?) I don't believe in the Immaculate Conception. I don't believe in Heaven or Hell. Especially Hell. What kind of God would do that to anyone? Sure there are assholes around, but burning for eternity seems harsh. Isn't torturing considered bad here on Earth? Why is it okay for God?

Take the emotion and what we all learned as kids out of it, and I think it's all just stories made up to keep people in line, like the bogey-man, as Indiana Jones put it.

Now, I'm not going to say that pedophile priests had nothing to do with my disillusionment, but the truth is I haven't gone to church regularly in 15 years. Sure, a few weddings and my nephews' First Communion and Baptism and stuff, but all I ever saw on those occasions were bitter old guys in robes yelling at everyone. Needless to say, I never felt the presence of a higher power, just an old windbag. So, the Catholic Church scandal really didn't do it for me. I was already gone. But it did give me more ammunition, because let's face it, I'm pretty sure most of the ones who weren't diddling little boys knew it was happening somewhere and never spoke up, so that makes them guilty. And there is no freaking way I'll ever give money to the church again, knowing that it's probably just going to pay their legal fees somewhere down the road.

But I'm not going to just rail on Catholicism, because most religions I know of are pretty out there. I'll boil it down to this; while it's wonderful that people need to believe in something greater than themselves to get by, throughout history, there have been more deaths, stonings, genocides, holy wars and Crucifixions in the name of religion than any of us will ever know. So, that doesn't seem like something I want to immerse myself in right now.