Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Baraka_Guru
Does this mean that you once believed in smurfs?
|
No and I'm not really sure if I ever
really believed in god or if it was just defereance to the authority of the Church.
I realized I was an atheist when I was 8, in Church. I'm not sure if that qualifies as believing in God per say even if I did when I was 7. The whole concept of Jesus loves you blah blah never really sank in, I didn't so much renounce my faith as just looked around and saw that it just didn't make any
sense.
Despite being now about 30 years ago I remember it rather clearly. I was sitting on the left side of the church, about half way back. It was a weekday morning mass which I went to on my own because I felt that it had to be a 'good' thing to do, plus being in a Catholic school I was able to hang out for a while before school opened which seemed fun. A very old priest was reading something or other, and there was a smattering of elderly people in the Church, something which you would expect to only see on a weekday morning. It just sort of dawned on me, less of an epiphany and more of a giant 'duh'. There was no god in that church, and no god anywhere else for that matter. I had no knowledge of advanced biology, plate tectonics, molecular clocks, or even the apparently important Hindenburg's uncertainty principle. Even without anything beyond a slightly advanced 3rd grade scientific understanding I could see that it just really didn't work, on any level.
The problem with religion, is not in how it violates scientific principles, but how it violates good old common sense. Perhaps this is why, a question which so many would think of as complex seems so simple to me. I almost have a hard time discussing it with people because I feel like I'm talking to a child who still believes in Santa.