Faith.

I am not a man of faith.

The world is built upon arbitrary truths. They are provable, they are tangible, they are usually resolute. For every action, there is a reaction. And while I may not know the first link, I can trace the chain back far enough to come to a satisfactory answer. As I grew into myself I found that the few things that do bring me closer to comfort are that which I can find evidence for.

I do not regret this. It is a part of me that I cherish. An attribute I hold dear. There's enough skeptic in me to ask questions for the sake of discovering the truth.

It has never failed me, except in one occasion;

Faith in myself.

I list my own accomplishments as mediocre. I know what my hands are capable of based on what they have created and accomplished. And while what I have done with my life may seem mediocre to some, I do know my own private victories. But those victories are private. My trophy cases are empty. I did not come from a participation award generation, and I don't know whether or not that's a good thing. All I know is that a person's worth is often measured by what they've achieved. What accolades they've received.

Based on this, it's hard to have faith in myself. I find myself in a loop of attempting to prove myself to me, but in order to know what I am capable of, I look to the evidence of what I've done. My limits scare me. I know the meat suit I pilot well enough to have found where the wires are clipped and which joints need greasing. I understand that the longer I function, the more outdated my hardware becomes. I know how fast I can run a kilometer. I know the highest grade I've achieved on a math test.

Based on what is, it seems that I am not capable of very much.

It's hard for me to take on faith that I am capable of more. There's not much evidence of that. It's a scathing reminder that while a nurturing environment can assist us in achieving our potential, our nature defines our limits. And I fear, that based on current data, I have already reached mine.

Taking on faith that I am capable of more is a tough thing to do.

A lot of people like to throw around quotes about how we're afraid of reaching our potential. And while they make for great graduation speeches, real life proves itself to be a little more complex.

I am glad that life is complex. I am proud of my nature. I simply wish that I was able to have a little more faith in me.

Faith is hard to come by.

I think this is perhaps the only time skeptical thinking has ever been detrimental.

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Two years later; Does my Disdain For Organised Religion Still Hold?

If you've ever been disillusioned from a belief system you were indoctrinated into as a child, it's understandable that you'd bear some animosity towards it.

And when I drew the straw that broke the camel's back I had to watch a part of me crumble into dust without as much as a warning. I was mad. I was mad that I had internalized the teachings into my person that made my life harder, that made me feel feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing that would take years to shake. We'd drifted from different congregations as we moved but the one I remember the most was the NG Kerk (Dutch Reformed Church, I think...? Weird Afrikaans things I never learned the English words for) and the commonalities and differences between it all was part of what eventually drove me away, because Christian teachings are scarily inconsistent across the variant sub-sections.

To top it all off, I was an objectively worse person when I still had held Christian beliefs. There wasn't a lot of wiggle room for me to grow as a person whilst juggling the dilemmas of everyday life alongside the morals and values that had been instilled to me by various mentors, teachers and parent figures growing up.

After it all, I became a rather aggressive atheist. The belief that theistic religion was toxic had enveloped a piece of me with a bitter rage. I still do believe it can be toxic, and I witnessed first hand at what made it toxic, but I've since mellowed.

Then when I did my thirty day blog challenge, I was to write a piece about my thoughts on religion (which is coincidentally the piece that has the most views), I remember revisiting those memories made me even angrier. Fuel to the fire. A reminder.

But the writing helped heal.

And as such, in 2017, as with any beliefs one holds, it's good to review and ruminate on them to see if you've changed.

Don't get me wrong, I still do get angry when I see someone misusing religious authority or citing religious texts as a moral reason for hatred or bigotry instead of using empathy like I know they're capable of.

But if I had to be genuinely honest, I do not harbour the intense hatred I once had for religion. Hating takes energy, These days I'm a permanently exhausted pigeon, and life is short and everyone is going to die and succumb to the sterility of entropy so nothing we do in this life matters and everyone and everything that has ever existed is insignificant.

That is to say, life is too short.

I mention this because I've noticed in harbouring hatred towards organised religion, there's a tendency for atheists to also hate religious people.

And that's something I think is objectively wrong.

A lot of atheists hold inherently Islamophobic views. And while I think neither Islam nor any religion is above criticism or parody, I do think Muslims deserve all the same rights and respect that I'm afforded. That's just how we should treat fellow human beings.

This came up recently with a debate in some Facebook comment thread about whether or not the Hijab is a valid form of female empowerment, to which I replied as thus, and I paraphrase; There's this core tenet of feminism which states that no one gets to police how any woman empowers herself. And while I think it's healthy to criticise any idea, I do think we have to distance criticism from cynicism.

Atheists would take a symbol like the Hijab and invalidate simply on the grounds that it's a religious symbol. And while to me, a piece of cloth is a piece of cloth and I have no desire to show any given cloth much more respect than any mundane cloth would earn, if that specific cloth empowers someone, than it deserves to at least be acknowledged as a symbol of empowerment, even if I would also say that in certain places, making it mandatory does take away from its ability as a symbol of empowerment, such as the case when a chess grandmaster was banned form entering the world championship for refusing to wear the hijab.

I'm still a vocal advocate for freedom from religion and separation of church and state. While I may have become more moderate, I do think such examples are detrimental and worthy of criticism.

However, if I had to answer the question of whether or not I'd press a button that would instantly destroy religion, wipe if from the face of the earth, to be forgotten and never dug up again...

I don't know if I would press it.

Faith in something has given comfort to the dying, the sick, the old. It's saved some people from severe depression. It's formed communities. I'd press a button that made every religion clean up its fucking act and stop active attempts at making the world a worse place. I'd press that button hard.

But I know that faith helps some. It gets some people to sleep at night.

And I'm a firm advocator of having the right to believe in whatever you want. I think everyone believes something that might not be entirely logical or is at least unverifiable. I believe people are at their core are good. I believe that everyone suffers in this life and you're likely going to receive as much harm and hate if not a great deal more than you dish out. I believe everyone deserves a chance at redemption if they are willing to make a conscious effort towards it. I believe death isn't a fitting punishment for any crime.

I fully acknowledge that religious beliefs and faith are not one and the same. Faith can be held in things that aren't religious. Human beings are imperfect and sometimes we just have to go off our gut feelings because we don't have all the information.

I'm not trying to dissuade anyone from believing in what they believe in, truth be told I encourage the diversity of thoughts and positions it may bring. I think life would be a little more boring if we were all the same and I genuinely think that religion has made certain people objectively better and has done them a lot of good. There are plenty of churches that do charity work for their communities and I can't fault that in the slightest. It provides people with social interaction which is a basic human need, and creates a network and support group to fall back on in hard times. Hell, I wish there was a place atheists could meet up and discuss philosophy and philanthropy and socialize instead of the clusterfuck that currently is the YouTube atheist community, I'd love to create or be part of a secular house that has secular equivalents to church bands and youth camps and retreats, not for the theology of it but just the experience of people getting together and exchanging ideas and teaching and supporting each other.

Religion has many practices that were created out of necessity and frankly I wish there was a way to translate some of those practices into society in a secular fashion. LaVeyan Satanism recognized this and incorporated rituals for the psychodrama into their branch of atheism/anti-theism (although this is a topic for another week that I would love to dive into).

But perhaps wishing for all the benefits of organized religion without the drawbacks is wanting to both have my cake and eat it. Maybe there isn't a way and we're all better of just being the secular apes that live and die in the meaningless fashion that nature intended before the universe collapses in on itself. I don't know, I don't have all the answers.

But I just don't have the energy to hate religion anymore. Life is too busy to spend so much time on one thing.

But if there's any takeaway from all this, don't let religion stop your kids from enjoying Harry Potter, that's just a daft practice. Ignorance and bigotry are always inexcusable and that much I do still find a minute in the day to loath.

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