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Blogs by Dorien Grey
I Believe...
4/9/2012 10:13:06 AM
What each of us believes, and why we believe it, makes us uniquely human.
Each of us, from birth, acquires a set of beliefs upon which we base our lives, our attitudes and our actions. There are two basic types of belief: those we format ourselves, from our own experience, and those which are simply handed us. (“This is the way it is, kid.” “Oh. Okay.”) Many of our beliefs are fed us from infancy in the form of the regurgitated beliefs of our parents, not unlike birds feed their young. If our parents and our relatives believe something, we tend to believe it as well. It avoids a lot of pressure from our immediate peers, and saves us an awful lot of that pesky “thinking” stuff.
Many of my personal beliefs, not surprisingly, tend to differ considerably from the norm. I was never one for believing what I was told simply because I was told to believe it. Despite frequent evidence to the contrary, I consider logic to be the single most important factor in any belief. I am constantly in receipt of emails whose sole purpose seems to be to defy and utterly destroy logic. That people spew out this raw sewage is disheartening enough…that other people not only actually accept it as gospel and pass it on to others is mind-boggling.
One belief lies at the very core of my being, and it has to do, paradoxically, with beliefs: you have the inalienable right to believe whatever you wish to believe. You do not have the right to impose your beliefs on me. I find it bitterly ironic that so very many people who demand the right to their beliefs also demand that everyone else share them. I may not share your belief. I may on occasion think your belief is antithical to mine. But I would never dream of insisting you abandon it solely because I don’t agree with it.
I hold strong personal beliefs about religion. 1) I despise the unmitigated gall of proselytizers who show up at your door to show you the “way to the truth”...you obviously being far too stupid to find it yourself. If I wish someone’s counsel on the subject, I shall ask for it, thank you. 2) If there is a Hell, the Lava Level is reserved for those who presume to speak for God. I sometimes regret being an agnostic if for no other reason than that I would truly love to see Reverent Phelps and his loathsome ilk suffer eternally the agony they have caused others. 3) When someone tells me they are “born again” I am tempted to suggest that if they’d done it right the first time, they could have saved themselves the trouble. 4) More wars, misery, and human suffering can be attributed to organized religion than to any other cause. 5) While I would truly like to believe in God and Heaven…and freely admit to having called upon Him from time to time…logic overwhelms desire, and I cannot. I can and do hope, but I cannot truly believe.
As to an afterlife, I simply cannot believe in one. I believe, and have stated several times before, that when we die, we simply re-enter the nothingness from which we emerged. We weren’t aware of anything before we were born, and we’ll not be aware of anything after we die. There is nothing the least bit frightening about this concept, and it encourages me to appreciate the preciousness of every minute of life while I have it.
I continue to believe in the basic goodness of humanity, despite mountain ranges of evidence to the contrary. It is the relatively few sick, perverted, evil creatures among us whose only link to humanity is genetic who cast their pall on the rest of us. I believe we hear so much about the bad things in the world simply because they are the exception, not the rule.
Conversely, I hold those who merely accept whatever they’re told, who never question anything, to be second class humans. Ignorance can be cured. Stupidity cannot.
Well, enough for the moment. Oh, and did you know that the Jews control the world and everything in it? They get their power from eating Christian babies. I heard that somewhere, so it must be true. Right?
*****
Please take a moment to visit my website (http://www.doriengrey.com) and, if you enjoy these blogs, you might want to check out Short Circuits: a Life in Blogs (http://bit.ly/m8CSO1 )
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