Why I am an atheist?

Why I am an atheist?

I was raised in religious family that placed God and its presence above everything else. And I remember how weird as a concept it was for me. Since I was a child I was very much into science, reading all the books I had set my eyes on, but one book in particular had opened up a pandora’s box. And since then the seeds of distrust in God were planted. I started to question dogmas I was raised on.

First, I believed wholeheartedly in all the stories my dad told me about God. How he saves everyone, how kind he is, how he sees everything and how he is everywhere. But later, in science classes, I started to understand, how the world actually worked. Why the sky is blue, why I’m a girl and why my mind works the way it does. Later on I got an obsession and fascination with particle physics, and it told me so much more about the world. Every new discovery felt so natural to me. At that point, I started to reimagine the God in my mind. Well, the world has been created from the Big Bang, so the God had to be before that, because it is not possible to create a universe from nothing. Or is it?

At that time I found the book literally called A Universe from Nothing by Lawrence M. Krauss. And I wanted to know, because it kind of was my last straw holding my belief in God, if there is even a possibility to have a universe without the need for all mighty being creating it and controlling. Of course, the book is only a theory, as all things in science is, but it was sufficient for me. Because if the universe can be at least in theory created from nothing, why there is a need for God?

I understand, why people believe in God. It might be a tradition, or some tragic or just very emotional event that led them into religion. Gods were needed in earlier stages of humanity. I love reading religious books and myths from all sorts of religions and corners of this planet. And the creation of God was reasonable. They needed something to answer the questions that they had no tools or possibility to answer themselves. For example, my most favorite example is rain and lightning. In almost all cultures, there is a God that has the power to wield these natural phenomena. In Hindu mythology it is Indra, in Norse it is Tor, in Slavic Perun and so on. This was because the people, humanity, didn’t yet understand the weather and the electricity in this case. So they placed that knowledge on hold and transferred it to God. But years went by and the knowledge grew, and we had lost the need to explain through God the world around us. We had acquired the needed knowledge to understand it on our own.

I think that transfer was also needed to free up peoples mind to then focus on different things, such as survival or farming and so on. The acquirement of knowledge mostly is performed during stable and prosperous eras where people had/have an abundance of food and have a feeling or safety, major component of survival.

I know there is also one more argument for God (there are a lot of arguments, but this one was and is most relevant for me) that humanity, or just individuals need God to be good. That God gives us an image of great goodness, or gives us the ethics. But I argue that I don’t need a God to be a good and decent human being. I hate when somebody tries to place a wrath of God in me to make me feel less. I hate this need to scare people to do something good, because it is not then done in good faith. To be good, is in my opinion to have good morals. Of course, each culture had developed its own ethics and morals, so what is actually moral can differ wildly across all continents. But can we agree that killing is bad? I wouldn’t want to be killed, so I won’t kill anybody. I won’t yell on someone or call somebody a slur, because I know what it is like to be on a receiving end of it and I remember how horrible it was. So, I think, having good morals is tied to being emotionally mature and emphatic person.

That of course is further tied to how your parents raised you, but you can always learn to be a better person. And I think this is what life is really about. Apart from biological need, such as survive, procreate and die, we can ourselves create a meaning for our lives. We don’t have to be tied up to some religion, we are humans, and we are forever free to create our own beliefs.

P.S.: This essay was inspired by this post a lot and I wanted to share this piece of art with everyone.