I used to be a Christian. Well, in the sense that I used to go to Church because my best friend at the time did. I'm not sure I ever properly believed in God. I used to like getting the sweets at Christmas, which is a very bad reason for going to church.
I moved on to agnosticism - believing that we will never know with the evidence we have whether God exists or not. I don't mean to offend anyone, but I feel that this is the easy way out. The evidence that you have is in front of you, and it is up to you to interpret it as being evidence for the existence of God or for the non-existence of God (the main example here is the fossils debate - they can be said to be proof that the world is older than it should be according to the Bible or something else God created to test our faith). To sit on the fence in the form of agnosticism is not something I feel is worthwhile. If you 'don't know' then you are not living your life to any sort of certainty, and making the decision which view you subscribe to is a gutsy thing to do, but it solves this problem and gives you something to stand up for.
I then dabbled with the idea of Buddhism as a religion. But this again does not really address the 'God question'. It is more about adapting your way of life to make yourself a better person and achieve Nirvana rather than reincarnation upon death (but I'm not doing your Religious Education homework for you, Google it!).
But then I moved on to atheism. If you Google 'define atheism' you get: The theory or belief that God does not exist.
Christians will always try to preach their religion to you, because it is in their religion to do so, but I think of myself as a quiet atheist. I don't try and convince other people that my viewpoint is right and theirs is wrong, unless they first say that I am wrong. But after reading one to many threads on a forum about atheists being evil because they have no God to give them a moral system or trying to give 'absolute proof' of the existence of God, when all they are doing is adding to the poorly argued case of Christianity (which is not to say that all Christian arguments are poor, just the ones that I seem to end up in), I decided I would explain why I subscribe to such a viewpoint.
There are a lot of points I could go into about the circular nature of arguments in Christianity and the 'Does it really matter if I believe in God because (s)he is good and will forgive me?' premise; but I'm not going into that here. (However, if you would like to buy me a drink and have a good chat about it, I am open to that).
Basically, I do not need God to explain the world (I am not trying to plagiarise Alex Day here, but a lot of my idea is based on and extrapolated from his video, just click his name). If you think of a God as a designer then it makes everything that surrounds us much less impressive. Darwin's Theory of Evolution states that all living things in the world right now are a product of natural selection - they were the most suited to their environment and so they were able to pass on their genes and so those genes survived while less suitable ones died out. A butterfly with a brightly coloured pattern on it's back that looks like eyes is so because that helps to fend off predators (because they think it can see them or think the colours may mean it is poisonous) and not because God thought it would be nice to look at. Human beings evolved and now build skyscrapers and invented the internet not because we were created in God's image before being cast out of the Garden of Eden, but because those who had the extra brain power to make tools and use them to build houses for protection could pass on their genes and those who caught diseases and died from sitting out in the rain doing nothing could not.
If God is responsible for all of this, then everything that humans have achieved is nothing that we can be proud of. If a cure for cancer was found tomorrow, it would be hailed a 'miracle' and God would get credit from some people who believe that we are able to do everything that we do as a species only because of what God did in the beginning and what he does to look over us. If God is responsible for 'miracles' (although this largely depends on your definition of a miracle) then what is the claim to fame for the human race? If we evolved from single celled organisms over millions of years and formed these intelligent creatures that are able to manipulate our surroundings instead of our surroundings manipulating us, then that is something that we - as a species - should take pride in. If God created us as we are, then this pride has no place.
In the end it all boils down to your way of life. If believing in God is what gets you out of bed in the morning then I am not going to try and destroy that belief in you - because it is obviously doing you a lot of good. I just don't get the same effect, because if I believe in the omnipotent God that is looking after me, I feel depressed about the state of our species. We are just as God made us; and God did not make us perfect (just read Genesis). We have hardly advanced from the Garden of Eden standpoint if you compare that to the progress that we have made - how far we have come - in order to be the intelligent beings that we are through evolution.
My view of the world is one where God has no place, where we have made our own present and we have control over our own future. If a cure for cancer is found that is because of the evolution of intelligence leading to the invention of equipment to develop better drugs, and should not be hailed as a 'miracle'.
I do not need religion to feel good, I do not need religion to explain the world, and that is why I am an atheist.
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