Alright, a quick recap. Teacher did a boohoo, I went down a spiral. Is God real? Boom, full-blown Atheist before all my real teeth came in. My belief was this,
The concept of God is a placeholder for when people wonder about the universe's origin.
An Athiest doesn't have answers to the universe's origin, but he is convinced that God is definitely not the answer. And I wasn't just a quiet one; I was full-on advocating it; I was challenging people on their faith every chance I got. Now, you're probably imagining a full-grown man going table-to-table rambling about how God isn't real; that isn't entirely accurate. Imagine a kid the size of your leg going from one bus bench to another, just annoying other kids out of their faith; yup, that was me :)
My go-to line was this: if you only prayed when you needed stuff from God, are you really religious? And if you're not really religious, why believe in God?
None of these kids cared, and the ones that did just asked me to fuck off. Fair.
But after a while, I couldn't help but notice flaws in my logic. If a religious person is flawed when he prays for just his wishes, isn't an atheist flawed when he prays to get out of a jam? See, when I decided to become an atheist, I had no problems in the world; everything I did turned out great, everything I touched turned to gold. I was practically being pampered by the world.
But as I grew older, things started getting out of my control. I was getting caught in situations I had no say in, I found myself at dead ends that I had no clue how to get out of, and for the first time in my life, I had started losing more than 5 marks in an exam (trust me it was a huge deal for me, I cried a lot). And at every low point, I naturally turned to God; the words, "Please God", came out so smoothly, it was hard to resist. I was a cute little hypocrite (not true; I was super not cute).
See, I realised that I found it easy to reject the notion of God because I never needed anyone but myself to live a perfectly happy life. Everything was under my control. Now that things were getting out of hand and I started getting a little taste of what it meant to have a relationship with God, I stopped being so hard on the concept.
I was now an Agnostic. I didn't know it then because although this ideology is common, the word isn't. It means that I didn't care whether God was real; I just wanted to live my best life.
Still, there was something else I hated that started to take the limelight. Religious practices and the industry built around it.
Religion is a man-made division built around how people choose to relate themselves to God.
And the industry built around it exploits this division. Not only does it make it impossible for the divisions to disappear, but it also profits from it. Astrologers would look into the stars and instruct my father to spend thousands on a temple. How does that make sense?
"You'll have to see me again after a month", ~ my family astrologer (probably because I never actually went to one of these sessions)
And the senseless rush in popular temples with saints claiming their wealthy devotees like a rickshaw stand outside a bus terminal. NO WAY, that's how it's meant to be.
Religious practices are unnecessary, and they make you vulnerable to exploitation.
So yeah, these were my thoughts back in 10th grade. I came out of the Atheistic phase cause I was starting to understand the need for God, and more importantly, I began to realise that it's the practises that needed this sort of scrutiny.
Of course, like always, I've changed since then, but that's a blog for another day (tomorrow). So stay tuned and feel free to dislike this (Hahaha you can't, might as well like it).
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