a final draft

This is late! So late! I am to blame and accept the consequences.
I'm not sure if this meets the word requirement. The computer isn't letting me check. Well, I am satisfied with it anyway.

This topic is one I've mulled over, and rewritten several times without pleasing myself. But since it is something I think I know a lot about, at least in relation to myself, I'm going to write about it. Here goes...


A Crisis of Faith

In my life, there is a whirlpool of conflicting ideals. Faith is one, an especially interesting one because it gets less and less relevant as I age.

For most of my childhood, my parents were semi-active catholics. We attended church occasionally, and I was told to pray for my mother in her illness and to thank their god for my well being. The god figure was always hazy, I never really felt a strong connection to the rituals or the figures. The stories were archaic, even ancient, and the characters bland.

So I guess it was because I couldn't relate to the stories, characters, and vague ideals that first led me to question what my family believed in. I don't remember quite when-before I was in third grade, after I left Europe. What had mattered to me then? Why did a gullible child like myself refuse to believe in the "time-tested" faith of her ancestors?

Faith didn't make sense for the same reason my life didn't make sense. I was told this god loved all his creations, even the "misguided" unfaithful like myself. I could only ever see this god as power hungry, however-one who considered himself above mankind, yet allowed mankind to make the myriad of mistakes that it did (and most especially, does.) So when I was told to pray, it was more like begging, kneeling before what gave me life and would most certainly take it away, hopefully in exchange for eternal peace.

Eternal peace, heaven, and her sister hell never made sense. Heaven was no sort of comfort with hell being around, and nobody to tell you if you were right or wrong. Where was heaven for the lingering ghosts my sisters and I saw in the night? Why did an equal and almighty being like this god become selective when it came to accepting his daughters and sons?

If everyone had god in them, if everyone could listen to god's voice guiding them, then why wasn't everyone Catholic? It was this early train of thought that led me to question what people told me was the truth. Those mundane hours spent in church doing nothing and preferring to mock the people who called themselves messengers of god was perhaps well-spent. I can never shake that god never was and never will be, not after the gifts of knowledge science and logic has given me. And this awe-inspiring science has been with me since that early childhood, the days spent with my microscope and the infinitely inconceivable theory of molecules, atoms, cells, the cosmos, and so much more that I found in my father's books.

Was it my mother's illness that inspired my skepticism? Was it sincerely the words of the scientists in the documentaries I cherished? It's hard for me to tell, but I think it's both. I don't doubt that it's a perfectly normal, even preferable to believe in god. What really baffles me is why people use religions like this, based on love and tolerance, to justify the persecution of so many.

I couldn't possibly associate myself with a religion of such power. It's not my place to act like their god is within me, and that I owe my good decisions to him and my bad decisions to myself. I am who I make myself, and it's never going to be who that god seems to say I am (through the imperfect voices of other humans who are presumably below him.)