I'd love to answer anybody's questions, but I'll usually avoid the ones about friends or relationships because those tend to bore me. :) I am knowledgable in a variety of topics, specifically fashion, etiquette, and questions about spirituality
/religion. Proper grammar and spelling is * sOoOo freekin hAwTt*.
But anyhow, I will try to answer every question as best as I can. I can't promise, however, to sugar-coat things or tell you what you want to hear, or rid my answers of any sarcasm, but I'll try. :)
I am a strong Christian that likes to study other religions, so I can better see eye-to-eye with people who have different opinions than my own. I am not perfect, nor do I claim to be, so please, never take any of my answers too personally. :)
In my spare time, I love playing the piano, listening to folk/indie music, doing volunteer work, writing, studying Spanish, learning about fashion and make-up, and acting competitively.
Ciao! :)
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I can’t help but feel as though I’m not headed anywhere good.
I have not one, not two, but three mental disorders, one of which they discovered in me. Lucky, no? The first one, depression, was discovered when I was in seventh grade (I’m in ninth now) and pushed me to attempt suicide several times. I got over that and moved straight on to anxiety, which proceeded to generally be a bitch to me in all areas. Then, my doctor managed to identify the third one, which I’d had for years. That’s the unidentified one, which I like to call “Emotionless Bastard Syndrome”. Basically, my emotions turn off, sometimes when provoked and sometimes for no particular reason. I’ll be somewhere and I’ll just go completely numb.
Over the past few years, I’ve started to feel more and more… Distant. I’ve read very heavy books and graphic novels, and grow more and more disgusted by my own species. I wrote this, which is probably not a good sign:
***
Dear Humanity,
What the fuck happened?
I mean this in all seriousness. You were doing so well. Genuinely, I think everyone expected you would turn out great. You certainly had an excellent start…. You discovered the wheel, fire, electricity, and a whole lot of complicated nuclear stuff. I was always able to overlook your shortcomings because of your promising future, but now this shit has gone too far. You’ve pushed your luck, folks.
Where to start? I guess the first thing I should mention is this little consumer ideal thing you’ve got going for you. You just can’t stop buying shit… And not even shit you need, stupid shit. There’s also bullshit, but I’ll get to that later. So anyway, you kicked off with all this capitalism and free enterprise stuff and that seemed like it was working out, better than communism in any event. But then you got your second addiction, and this addiction was to buying. Didn’t matter what, you would buy pretty much anything and everything regardless of whether you needed it or not. Once again, began pretty innocent. You had free enterprise, you could buy or sell whatever shit you needed, and it was good. But Jesus Christ. How many brands of vacuum cleaners need to fucking exist in the first place? Humanity, I sentence you to watch the movie Fight Club about eight hundred times.
Next, how about we talk about ignorance. This is another strong one, particularly amongst the young. Now, for fuck’s sake, you guys are inheriting the future, and this is the kind of mindset you’ve got? There’s other people starving all over the world, there are kids with dads who rape them every night, and the best complaint you have is about the color of your god damn iPod? Also, if there’s a country that represents the human mindset, it’s America. You use up 80% of the world’s resources, ignore the counsel of other countries, invade smaller nations whilst trying to force your system of government upon them, and have the balls to call yourself leader of the fucking free world? Christ, Teddy Roosevelt would be rolling over in his grave.
And while we get to the subject of invasion and wars, I would like to politely ask the lot of you to sit and wait for five fucking minutes before blowing each other up for once. Come the fuck on. It seems like as soon as everybody has their conflicts resolved and they don’t give a shit about their differences, someone gets greedy or stupid or pissed and decides to find another reason to kill people. And before you know it, BAM! War. Another fucking war. Who’d have guessed? Whether it be for revenge or land or money or resources or women or honor or stupidity, it seems vital to you that you kill a whole bunch of each other in order to satisfy you for a short period of time. Come on guys, at least be original.
Moving on, I’d like to point out the royally shitty job you’ve done of taking care of the place you got handed to you. It was classy, too: Millions of other species, vast geological wonders, and natural occurrences that could only be described as miracles, and you had to move in and burn all the forests and kill all the whales and destroy your fucking ozone. An ozone, I have to give you credit for that one. That’s impressive. I mean, it’s one thing to go out and be completely selfish bastards to all the other beings your sharing the planet with, but to destroy something that existed only for your protection in the god damn first place? Humanity, your incredible selfishness and short-sightedness remains unmatched. I can’t imagine. I just can’t imagine.
Now, lets move on to our most pressing matter, which would be bullshit. By this, I would mean the bullshit that you’ve clouded your worlds with. It’s on your news, in your books, filling up your churches… No fucking surprise it’s in your minds. Still not clear what bullshit is? You believing a woman who tells you that the 9/11 widows are all profiting from their husbands deaths, that’s bullshit. A politician who tells you that the rights of a lump of cells outrank those of a crippled man or a grandmother with Alzheimer’s, that’s bullshit. A Texan who tells you that someone else’s happiness detracts from his happiness, that’s bullshit. Every dinner table manner you’ve ever had to learn, every polite lie you’ve ever had to tell, every useless algebra fact they ever drilled into your brain, that’s all prime BS. And a clergy member who tells you that god is amidst all the burning bodies and screaming children? What you have here is real bullshit.
In the bullshit department, religion is the undisputed champion, and always has been. As usual, an innocent start: A bunch of people decide that life sucks and they don’t know what comes after it, so there’s some big guy in the sky who’s taking care of all that for them. I repeat: Come the fuck on. I really would think you would have gotten over this shit by now. This primitive idea has been defended in so many ways for so many years it grows sickening. “Why did god burn my house down?” He works in mysterious ways. “Why did he give me cancer?” We are all a part of his plan. “Why does he murder the children?” Their time on earth was done. Has it ever occurred to you that right now, and I mean right now, there are people who are living lives that will consist of more misery and less happiness than you could ever imagine? There comes a time where you just have to stop rationalizing and admit the blindingly obvious: You are alone in your sad little existence.
Humanity, your being has been a downward spiral for thousands of years, and I believe that you are now beyond redemption or any kind of savior. Buy your last clothes, kill your last enemies, suck your last drops of oil from the earth, and pray to whatever gods or myths you may wish. You were so promising… But your time has finally come. Like all species, you will fade into the past, where perhaps others will learn from your failure. But for now, all you can do is hope for the best.
Truly,
Me
***
I began to feel as though the weight of the world was on my shoulders. Now, it seems as though I’m so inside myself that no one knows my true face… I hide behind a wall of atheism and skepticism, which is probably more curiosity gone wrong than a genuine staunch opinion. Every day I’d look up more and more reasons why God doesn’t exist… And boy did I find them. But I recently realized that what I’m looking for is not disproof: It’s proof. I want to believe so badly that someone out there more competent than humans handling this, but I just can’t bring myself to. I recently got a girlfriend, which helped a lot.
And now, I feel like I’m chasing a dream or a ghost of some sort. I’ll go onto Google and search for words like “meaning” or “answers”. I don’t know what I want, I don’t know why I want it, but I can’t stop wanting it… I just don’t know what’s going on. It’s like I’m slipping out of reality or falling out of the world. Thanks for reading this far. I guess I was hoping maybe somebody had answers.
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If somehow I had every answer to every philosophical question about meaning and existence and purpose and reason, then I would write it down in a book, sell it on E-bay, and buy out Donald Trump. But in all seriousness, here is my opinion, and you are very lucky that 5+ people have read your entire question because I usually just skip over ones like that. But yours grabbed my attention. :)
You ask about why evil exists in the world, and why God doesn't try to stop it. You give several common examples, all of which are very legitimate and difficult to answer. This will make for a very long answer, but I like this analogy.
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A University professor at a well-known institution of higher learning challenged his students with this question.
"Did God create everything that exists?"
A student bravely replied, "Yes he did!"
"God created everything?" The professor asked.
"Yes, sir, he certainly did," the student replied."
The professor answered, "If God created everything; then God created evil. And, since evil exists, and according to the principal that our works define who we are, then we can assume God is evil."
The student became quiet and did not answer the professor's hypothetical definition. The professor, quite pleased with himself, boasted to the students that he had proven once more that the Christian faith was a myth..
An other student raised his hand and said, "May I ask you a question, professor?"
"Of course," replied the professor. The student stood up and asked, "Professor does cold exist?"
"What kind of question is this? Of course it exists. Have you never been cold?"
The other students snickered at the young man's question.
The young man replied, "In fact sir, cold does not exist. According to the laws of physics, what we consider cold is in reality the absence of heat. Every body or object is susceptible to study when it has or transmits energy, and heat is what makes a body or matter have or transmit energy.
Absolute zero (-460F) is the total absence of heat; and all matter becomes inert and incapable of reaction at that temperature. Cold does not exist. We have created this word to describe how we feel if we have no heat."
The student continued, "Professor, does darkness exist?"
The professor responded, "Of course it does."
The student replied, "Once again you are wrong sir, darkness does not exist either. Darkness is in reality the absence of light. Light we can study, but not darkness. In fact, we can use Newton 's prism to break white light into many colors and study the various wavelengths of each color. You cannot measure darkness. A simple ray of light can break into a world of darkness and illuminate it. How can you know how dark a certain space is? You measure the amount of light present. Isn't this correct? Darkness is a term used by man to describe what happens when there is no light present."
Finally the young man asked the professor, "Sir, does evil exist?"
Now uncertain, the professor responded, "Of course, as I have already said. We see it everyday. It is in the daily examples of man's inhumanity to man. It is in the multitude of crime and violence everywhere in the world. These manifestations are nothing else but evil.
To this the student replied, "Evil does not exist, sir, or at least it does not exist unto itself. Evil is simply the absence of God. It is just like darkness and cold, a world that man has created to describe the absence of God. God did not create evil. Evil is the result of what happens when man does not have God's love present in his heart. It's like the cold that comes when there is no heat, or the darkness that comes when there is no light."
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Anybody can post their opinion about anything under your question, and it won't do your question any justice. Really. Who are we to tell you the meaning of this world and your life when really we're trying to figure it out for ourselves? I love what you said about "hiding behind a wall of atheism and skepticism." You are obviously incredibly smart and well-spoken, so I challenge you to look for more answers not from a bunch of anonymous internet posters, but from God himself. Honestly. God put you in this position for a reason, and you are dealing with the struggles in your life because something is going to come from them. I promise. Maybe not this week, this year, or in this decade, but your life will not be in vain, I can promise you. For one day, one day, I challenge you to put your hands in the life of God. Just once. See what he does. You can say, "How can you possibly trust your life with something you don't even have proof exists?" We don't know gravity exists- we can speculate, we can do experiments, but nobody will ever see or touch gravity-- yet we trust it with our lives every day. God can't hurt us, he won't hurt us, so just try it. See what happens. I promise you, if you sincerely do that, something will happen. I sound nuts, I know, but just do it. You say you want so badly to believe that someone is out there more competent than us human beings, and that is something I greatly admire. Honestly. Part of Christianity, part of any religion for that matter, is having faith and an open mind. For putting our lives in the hands of something we can't prove, but do anyways. What's there to lose? I would rather cling to something false than live in pain and sadness everyday as I Google my life in hopes of some clarification. You are right. Atheism is just a mental wall that shields you from discovering the truth, and closes off your mind to any possibility of hope. I believe you can do this. Don't waste your incredible gift of intelligence and talent (which, is very apparent in this question) only to shut off your mind from any light or guidance or real hope.
Here's to hoping that made any sort of sense. :) Please, honestly, if you have any other questions, ask me.
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EDIT: Wow! Rational is something I've never been called. You could possibly have made my day. ;)
Thanks for that. I hope maybe if you got anything out of my encyclopedia-size answer it's that not all Christians are nutcases. :)
In response to your rating ... I understand that you want to believe in God, I really do, but at what point to we allow rational thought and logic to stop controlling our lives and decisions and start relying instead on faith? The point I was making with the gravity analogy was not that gravity is proven and God isn't, but that it is not always necessary to be able to see something or touch something to accept it as reality. And could God not explain how things work?
Your questions about how God allows suffering in the world is possibly the most asked question by believers and nonbelievers alike. And yes, God does love all his children, and wants love in return. But can you really force someone to love you? No. So God gave us the gift of free will, which was taken advantage of in Genesis by Adam and Eve. Thus, the children being slaughtered at a young age. But how does that explain natural deaths and disasters? If we lived in a perfect world, why would we need God? If we never had the opportunity to have faith in God during our struggles, and why would we need a perfect life in heaven after death if we already had that perfect life on earth? The more you think about it, the more it will make sense.
I did read the link you sent me, and appreciate that. I have never seen that, so I went ahead and took the Einstein reference out of my story. Don't want to misrepresent anyone. :) But either way, I think it is still a good, thought-provoking explanation. :) Now, in return for my reading your little recommendation, will you read mine? "A Case for a Creator", a book by Lee Strobel, a former atheist. Even if it's just to further strengthen your testimony against a God, it's still a good read. :) Thanks again for being a pleasant person to discuss with.
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Rating: 4
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I'm giving you a 4 because you've managed to explain your position rationally, unlike many other Christians. However...
You have to understand how badly I WANT to believe, and believe me, there was a time where I did. I thought I had a good balance of religion with my life, and tried to incorporate God into rational thought. The more I did, however, the more I saw an inherent contradiction.
The absence of good argument is one I can only buy to a certain extent. I've heard the argument that it is up to us to create good, and God tries to test us... But there are children being born who will be slaughtered before they are even old enough to ponder atheism. There are people out there who will no so little happiness, and so much misery... How can he let this happen? Does he not love all of his children?
Also, the gravity analogy doesn't work. Gravity is something that explains the way things work: It is not a controversial idea, and is accepted and taught. There are no studies to disprove or prove gravity... God, on the other hand, is far different.
Also:
http://www.snopes.com/religion/einstein.asp
EDIT:
Can do.
I'm not going to recommend you any atheist reading, mostly because I think you just wouldn't be able to buy into it. However, a book you might find very thought provoking is called "God's Debris" by Scott Adams. Despite the title, it is very open minded.
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