The Doubting Thomas

In recent years, I have deeply soured on the idea of God and heaven.

    I wasn’t always the most devout follower to begin with, having been forced to attend Summer Bible School when I should have been enjoying a summer away from regular school.  At least that’s how I figured it.  What am I doing in a church basement making popsicle-stick coasters while listening to Bible verses, when I could be listening to my Beatles albums or swimming in the lake.

    After all, He took my father from me, and left me stranded in this space, so what did I owe Him?

    It wasn’t some self-inflicted death, either. It was heart disease that took my dad at the age of 47, so the manufacturer produced a flawed product.  And He didn’t make doctors smart enough to fix it.

I was made to look after myself in my formative years, with no siblings or male influence to build on.  It wasn’t the worst thing that ever happened to a kid, but it certainly seemed to be preventable.

As I grew older, and one assumes wiser, I started to quarrel with the logic of it all. None of it is plausible, and it’s mostly our inability to contemplate death that makes us believe in - well, anything.

We want to think that there’s something “after” all of this, when the dire outcome is that there is not.  We can’t think about nothingness, and we aren’t really nothing while we’re sleeping, so that’s not a good comparison. Our brain still works, and that’s the worst part of this whole scenario. The working brain.

God forbid (literally) we just die and cease to exist.  That’s not in the story.  The story that they concocted for us has us ascending to some higher plane that, oddly enough, we can’t comprehend. Sound familiar?  It’s classic storytelling. Good vs. evil, and neither of them is destroyed, so the conflict continues.  All of it somehow “told” to people who wrote down private communications between someone else and God.  When regular people hear voices in their head, they’re committed to some sort of supervised residency.  In religion, you’re a prophet.  That’s odd, also.

And, it’s the perfect business model. You can’t prove that they are wrong, so you buy-into it (literally) and you won’t be around to complain when it all goes in the shitter.

So, I choose to deny not only the Christian God, but the thousands of others that all of the other religions promote as “the one.”

The best part of it is that you can lead an honorable life without religion, and have your Sunday mornings to yourself.