What do I believe?

When I meet new people and the subject of religion comes up, it often leads me to share that I am a former Mormon.  People are usually fascinated by my story and what it was like living such a repressive lifestyle.  It frequently turns into a stimulating conversation with lots of questions, and inevitably, people ask what church I go to now.

I am frankly honest with them, and tell them that it's very hard to put trust in any other religion, or even trust in God since I spent my whole life living an obviously false set of teachings.  I was a very, very devout Mormon, and nearly all of my daily life involved Mormonism in some way.  When we left the church, there were layers and layers of indoctrination to peel off of my soul and my psyche.

I can honestly say that I have blossomed outside the oppressive regime of Mormonism.  I love my life.  I love my fellow human beings.  I embrace and accept them all at face value instead of judging them by the pitiful yardstick that was my Mormon upbringing.  People who knew me before I left Mormonism and see me now have noticed the change, the spring in my step, the light in my eyes, my enthusiasm and my smile.  I have left such a burden behind that I cannot help but be buoyant.

When I first left Mormonism, I assumed that I would always be Christian and that I would always believe in God.  As things evolved, and I allowed myself to think and believe whatever I like, I discovered that I do not believe in Jesus and I do not believe in God.  I call myself an apatheist now, which means I really don't care about God and I don't want to spend another minute of my life trying to figure out if there is a god or not, and what it is that he or she wants me to do.  It's a perfectly good waste of my life to do so.

My journey to apatheism started when I was watching a documentary about Auschwitz on Netflix.  One woman, who had been a child in Auschwitz said, "There was no god in Auschwitz."  I literally sat back on the sofa and stared into space in shock.  There was no god in Auschwitz.  Just wow!  I realized in that minute that I am a better parent than the god about whom I had been taught.   And trust me, I'm not that great of a parent, passable at best.  But I sure as hell wouldn't let my Nazi children kill my Jewish children.  Never.  I want my children to have free will, but I wouldn't stand by and watch one group of them kill another under the guise of free will.  In that very instant, I simply stopped believing in god.  

I see plenty of evidence that a belief in god can inspire people to do good in the world.  I also see that a belief in god can drive people to commit some of the most heinous evils.  I see no evidence that god, himself does anything for human beings.  I know that people pray and feel that their prayers are answered, but honestly, it doesn't feel right to me to pray about a lost pair of glasses and feel that god would hear and answer my prayer when there are millions of innocent children starving and being abused around the world.  If I were god, I simply couldn't watch that happen, meanwhile helping people find car keys, send extra money to pay the bills, and helping cars start.

So, what is left?  What do I believe?  I believe in doing good.  I believe in helping others.  I believe in humanity as a whole, and that we can do so much more together than any of us can individually.  If we can simply stop fighting about god, and which god we should worship.  Stop killing each other in the name of god.  How about we start leaving god out of the equation?

Many people ask me, "What if you're wrong?"  Well, if I'm wrong, and there is a god and I was supposed to worship him in a certain way, then he did a pretty horrible job of letting me know which way that is.  He made it extremely hard to believe in him at all.  I have friends of many faiths, including Mormonism, and all of them feel about their faith in the same way as each other.  Each feels that they have found the correct path back to god.  They can't all be right, and since each of the ways is flawed in some way, I choose none of these ways.  If there is, in fact, a loving god, he will understand that I spend the majority of my life being fooled, and living a false religion, so I think that gives me a "get into heaven free" card.  If he is there and is a loving god, and yet wouldn't let me have a gimme, then I wouldn't want to worship him anyway, and I'll join my fellow apostates and atheists in hell.

I ran across a quote this morning, posted by a friend on Facebook that affected me deeply, and inspired this blog post:

"If there is no hope of eternal life, then what is the purpose of life?" is a question we atheists often hear. My response is that there is indeed no purpose of life. there is purpose in life. If there were a purpose of life, then that would cheapen life. It would make us tools or slaves of someone else's purpose. Like a hammer that hangs on the garage wall waiting for someone to build something, if we humans were designed for a purpose then we would be subservient in the universe. Our value would not be in ourselves. It would be in our submission to the will of the toolmaker. That is slavery to a master, or infant dependency on a father figure. Besides, if there is a god, what is the purpose of his life? If he doesn't need a purpose, why do we? …..If I raise a child who is eternally dependent on me for meaning, then I am an inept parent.

There is no purpose of life. Life is its own reward. But as long as there are problems to solve, there will be purpose in life. When there is hunger to lessen, illness to cure, pain to eradicate, oppression to resist, knowledge to gain and beauty to create, there is meaning in life. A college student once asked Carl Sagan: "What meaning is left, if everything I've been taught since I was a child turns out to be untrue?" Carl looked at him and said, "Do something meaningful."  ~~Dan Barker.

And now I'm off to do something meaningful.