Me.
I am a scientist.
I don’t mean that I’m a biologist, and I spend my days in a lab. I don’t work with science, but I live with it. I want to know, and to understand things. I won’t ever believe something without a logical explanation for it. As a result:
I am an agnostic atheist.
This is not a contradiction. It’s just an easy way of explaining my absence of faith. Raised a Baptist Christian, when I got the opportunity to think things over for myself I rejected what I had been told to believe. I became an atheist as a reflex reaction to being made a Christian. However, I realised that the world is not that black and white, and I started thinking about what I’m actually comfortable with. I find the dogma of Atheism just as objectionable as the dogma of Christianity, so I mellowed my viewpoint to that of agnostic. But I add the atheism to indicate that I’m not “unsure” as a standard agnostic is, but rather “I have no belief in any god owing to an absence of evidence.” This means:
I believe our existence happened by chance.
We live in a virtually infinite Universe, so vast that there are many things we can only begin to guess about. The thing about infinity is that it makes things that have incredibly small chances of happening almost certain to happen. Therefore, wholly unlikely but nevertheless possible things, for example the spontaneous creation of life from basic molecules, will happen at least once. However:
I do not think the world is a pointless place with no depth.
Because we have evolved from whatever we started as to sentient and (at least some of us) intelligent beings with capacity for deep thought, artistic creativity, and emotional attachments. We are capable of inventing and writing music, discovering new things about our existence and the place it happens every day, and exploring the manifold possibilities of relationships with other humans and cats. For example:
I think there is a lot to love about the world.
There are some beautiful people in my life. Some of them are only in my life because they have written amazing books, or songs. Some of them are just very attractive, physically. Some of them are beautiful in their clarity of thought process. There are many people that I am just flat-out glad to know. And then there is nature. I love to walk through the park on a sunny day. It makes my heart glow to feel the sun on my back as I stroll among the trees (watching out for venomous snakes, of course). On the other hand:
I am becoming increasingly upset by humanity.
I have to remind myself of the people I love and the things I love, because otherwise the things that I see on a daily basis will destroy me. I see hatred and fear, violence and destruction, greed and self-importance in most of the people I encounter. Racism, sexism, ablism, sizeism, bagism, shagism, thisism, thatism, ismismism.. People closed-minded and full of prejudice. It’s too much for me to even contemplate attempting to go up against, and I chicken out:
I am not a confrontational person.
I avoid difficult conversation. I only want to talk about controversial issues with people who are capable of having a discussion, rather than an argument. I dislike argument intensely. I believe as a form of thinking, decision making and conversation it is a thoroughly flawed concept. I think people should work together, not against each other, to resolve differences.
TL;DR
I don’t believe in God
I do believe in love
I don’t believe in any ultimate consequences
I do believe in immediate consequences
I like haikus
This isn’t one
