How I see it (part 1)

[[This is a blog series - if something doesn't make sense, wait until the series is finished]]

I am a programmer and system developer.
It is my job to understand how systems interact, and how data relationships are interconnected.
It is my nature to dissect things and reassemble them to learn how these relationships exist.
I am actually in the process right now, at work, developing a piece of software to manage the intrinsic relationships between our ecommerce store platform, and how we manage our site.

It is with this perspective of dissection, and the culmination of certain bits of knowledge, experiences, and observations that I have taken a serious look at what it is I believe with regard to religion, and what I do not.

Such an investigation was spurred by observing several people I had known anywhere from a couple years to my entire life...having been with the assumption that we were in agreement on many aspects of our upbringing.

The turning point for myself was the morning of January 22, 2009 - when I hopped on Facebook to find that everyone I had shared many ideals with were suddenly standing in opposition to what I considered a fair and inevitable event...the election of President Obama.

My primary concern was the status updates and twitter posts from people who had professed prior that they were Christians. However this morning, there was nothing but pure hatred coming from their mouth just as there was the morning after elections in November 2008.

I did not and still don't understand why this is the case - I can only conjecture that it is for the very same reason I considered it to be OK to shun people who did not believe as I did only a few years earlier.

It was over the course of the previous 6 months that I had finally realized that the very things I was taught to believe in was precisely in opposition from what this country was founded on.


Since I was a child, I was taught that I must go out and explain to people that how they are living their life is completely wrong in God's eyes - even if they were of another denomination than Baptist, it was still wrong...priority was on the people who didn't go to church, of course, but even non-Baptists were still subject to be living in sin.

I had no problem patching up the gaps in the Bible between what I had learned via science and what I had learned in church. To me, the idea was to bridge the gap with some kind of faith-based truth, grounded in the Bible.

If I came across people who didn't believe like me, I would just remove them from my life, which was fairly easy, since my step-dad provided such a great example of how to shun friends and family, and to live independently.


Fast forward to 2003, and you'll find me in the process of being kicked out of my parents' house after being pulled out of East Texas Baptist University. Why am I being kicked out? Because I had learned to question that which was presented as infallible truth by my parents. I felt the need to understand why things were being carried out the way they were because I had just spent the previous year and a half being required to make decisions for myself while living independently on a college campus.

During this time, my communications were cut from the people I had gone to church with, and I was made to go to a previously forbidden church (the Methodist Church with the woman pastor) by these same parents who forbade it. Over the course of 5 years, my mom and step-dad had changed from Baptist to Church of God, to non-Denominational, to a break-away church, to Methodist. This went completely against what I had been taught - but I figured if they were doing it, it was somehow OK.


Jump to 2005, and I had been kicked out in 2003, and living with my dad and step-mom for the following 2 years, trying to go to a previously visited church in Arlington, because I knew my mom & step-dad had gone there, so it must be an OK place to go. Unfortunately during the 2 years I attended it, I felt as if the point of it all was very meaningless. I had one semi-close friend there, and the sermons were not very applicative, and the Sunday school was equally weak.

I moved out on my own in August of 2005, and did not feel like it was worth the 25 minute drive to visit the church any more. I also did not want to try other churches for the awkward introduction phase - I simply wanted to go and be left alone, or just not go at all.

Instead, I watched the Science Channel almost exclusively, and learned a great deal about the world around me - nature, space, earth, and people. I learned how planetary systems form, how stars die, and even the projected time left for the sun's energy to burn.

It was during the next couple years that I came to a sobering conclusion: that without religion in the picture, one's life is as bleak as a speck of dust carried away in the wind.


Consider this: all the time the earth has existed before you were born, you have no recollection of. That is BILLIONS of years of things existing prior to your cognitive recognition that anything could exist.
Now consider this: our life span is merely 120 years tops...often less - far less.
Finally consider this: when you die, without religion in the picture, there is no more cognitive recognition of existence. There is no realization that you are dead...there is no realization that you were ever even alive. There is no realization period - everything in the world will go on without you, and you will not be the wiser. People will continue to be born, and die, and you will have spent your one blip of life doing things that were supposed to make you happy.

What a sobering thought about our petty existence in the universe.