DP #1

Questioning Religion

Religion, or the lack thereof, is one of the most dominating factors in most people’s lives. Many are devout, many are secular, and many fall somewhere in between. Many often question why religion is practiced. Some reasons people practice religion are their culture or their family. But what is the actual reason besides doing it because your family or culture does? Most likely, it is to give purpose to life for people who would be otherwise lost without it. The thought of being alone in the universe or there being no purpose to life is scary and depressing to a lot of people. This is a logical reason that religion is so popularly practiced. However if most to all of these religions have a similar reason for existing, then why do some religions persecute and commit acts of violence upon others? Why are some religions discriminated against? These questions are what began my journey into questioning religion, understanding religion, and eventually discovering and following a new religion.

To begin, religion for me is what my parents told me to do. I was baptized when I was born and I was told that I was Christian. I just went along with it because it is what my parents said. However, the only time we went to church was on Easter and Christmas, so I never really got attached to Christianity like my parents and grandparents were. This led to a more open-minded view on other religions and new information in general. When I learned about how violent Christianity could be with crusades and forced indoctrination, I began to start questioning. My sophomore year of high school was the turning point on sort of leaving behind religion in general. My class had to read a book called Things Fall Apart in english. It was about an African tribe that was forcefully indoctrinated into Christianity and colonized. The main character along with his tribe is very religious and the new Christians come in and start to live near. They slowly begin to deconstruct the ways of the tribe. The main character eventually has to leave due to an event in the book, and, when he returns, the tribe has all been indoctrinated and those who defied were put in prison. Upon learning this, the main character commits suicide. This stuck with me, especially considering that it was a true story. I did not want to be associated with something that could cause this much destruction and suffering for others, so I stopped giving myself that label. I renounce religion pretty much entirely because I thought that perhaps it was an issue as a whole. I remained secular for pretty much my whole sophomore and junior year. This changed during the second semester of my senior year in my history class.

To continue, this history class was ancient history to renaissance, so we learned about the history of pretty much everywhere. This included the religions of the areas that we learned about. I have a passion for history, so perhaps since it was included in learning about other places, religion became an interesting part of history for me. Learning what other places and cultures believed became my favorite part of the class and we explored it somewhat thoroughly. I began to once again see more reason to believe in religion. However, I still remembered the violent acts of Christianity during its rise in Rome, the crusades, and in other points in history. So I did not go back to Christianity. Instead, I paid more attention to the religions I was learning about in the class and asked a good friend in the class about her religion since she was not christian. I learned about Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and the Abrahamic religions in the class. I also learned about Wicca from my friend, which I was surprised to learn had an actual religion attached to it and was not just spells. However this was not enough for me. At this point I kind of wanted a religion but I needed more options, so this led to my search. I believed that there was something bigger, but I was not sure what or who.

Moving forward, I began to research religions outside of my class. I used my beliefs, morals, and ideas as a baseline and compared the religions I researched to them. As stated before, I was pretty sure that something or someone with greater power had to create everything and I was not convinced by the scientific theory that attempts to explain it. I also knew that there was a lot of bad things that happened in the world, so I was also not convinced that the thing that created all was not the benevolent god that Christianity portrays. This was one of the main things that crossed off a lot of other religions as well. If the god or gods portrayed in these religions was so good, then why was there so much bad in the world? Why would the good god or gods keep the peace among all. This left me with some religions like Buddhism, Taoism, and other self focused religions. Buddhism did not work because I am unable to rid myself of worldly wants. I feel as if that is incredibly difficult to do. Taoism was pretty close but it did not explain why we were here so that was not great either. Eventually, I came across deism. It is a very simple religion that goes as follows. There is or was a god that created the universe, multiverse, or however far it may go. However, this god left us to our own devices and does not interfere. This explains creation as well as the evil that exists in the world. There is not a church for it because there is no reason to worship a god that will not interfere with us. We do not need to make it happy. Some deists believe that there is an afterlife and some do not believe so. Though nihilistic, I personally do not believe that there is one. However, this motivates me to make the most of my life. This religion aligned the most with what I believed and it made the most sense to me, so this is what I chose and still follow today.