Raised and confirmed Roman Catholic here to. Left when I realized that it was really just a yuppy conformity club. Did go to some more humble churches and liked the people more but by that time I was already fast approaching a much different understanding of people in general, why they act as they do, and really evolution had much more to do with it than spirit or deity. With my coming to a full-determinist stance in the last few years and then an understanding that its suspect whether the degree of suffering we go through makes us stronger on the whole or whether it more often makes us weaker/bitter/cynical adds more fuel to my belief that religion was something we came up with to bind society together, that it does have several thousand years of best-practices for society building so by all means the baby shouldn't be thrown out with the bathwater, but otherwise the prime evil in human existance is human suffering and damage to the future, other than that when we reach the end of our lives we close our eyes, our brains shut down, and either one of two possibilities ensue 1) We quite literally stop existing 2) We might find ourselves as a seat of consciousness in another life form asking all the same questions from scratch with no memory of any previous cognition. If there is any kind of life hereafter though, which we see no causal mechanism for, it is much more likely something that comes from us and is an artifact of human existance and momentum rather than necessarily being a heaven run by a god.
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The loneliest part of life: it's not just that no one is on your cloud, few can even see your cloud.
19 Sep 2011, 9:17 am
