Postlapsarian

So here I am. There isn't much to say.

I feel like some emo kid, sitting here in front of my computer with my head full of "things" I can't quite "express."

The only difference would be that I'm willing to stay silent. There's a lesson for you emo kids.

Here's where I'm refraining from quoting a song. This space intentionally left blank.

Easy target, sorry.

I wonder that I haven't become a worse person, and since it would be too easy to claim that even thinking such a thought lets me off the hook, this might become an actual problem.

For the moment though, let's keep it here, on the Internet, the place where people's problems go to die. It sounds good, anyways.

I was thinking about Nietzsche. Thus Spake Zarathustra, a book I admittedly didn't finish in English or in the original German, dealt with moving on, with finding a purpose.

(Because that's the whole point of "God is dead." Moving on.)

I was thinking about Nietzsche, because that's the kind of thing a whiz-kid super-genius like myself is prone to do, and I was wondering what I am going to do about this religion business.

I would never, like some condescending idiots tried to do a while ago, try to refer to myself as "a bright." The ugly word, atheist, is closer to the truth, because I don't have all the answers and have never claimed to have them.

I believe I'm right in my lack of faith, but I'm not about to bow down before No-God and worship him. As I gather many atheists do.

Having reluctantly passed the proverbial "last stop" of Agnosticism, I find myself at Atheism as if by accident. I certainly didn't mean to ride this far. Now it's cold and late.

Nevertheless, I'm here. Time for a bit of travel literature.

I remember quite distinctly that I used to believe—in the most earnest sense of that word—in many things.

I still believe, for example, that there is an essential difference between "love" and "infatuation," however vague both terms seem to be. I believe in the basic goodness of the several dozen or so people I trust and, inexplicably, I believe in America.

Once, though, these beliefs (supplemented nowadays by more cynical convictions) were joined by others. I used to believe in the Sacraments and the Holy Trinity. I used to believe in all three flavors of Mystery (it comes in Joyful, Glorious, and Sorrowful, as I recall). I used to believe in Transubstantiation, and I even understood the word "Consubstatiation," a Lutheran heresy.

I used to be a Roman Catholic, and at times this belief made me happy. I won't go into the specifics here.

In Freiburg, The Urbanite and I would talk about fate. She believes in fate and purpose. I'm probably a determinist, but I find the compounding effect of life's coincidences merely impressive, not divinely planned.

It's from this perspective that I see how a younger Old Bold Hero lost his faith.

I'm not sure how or when it started, but I've pinpointed two or three minor events that I think contributed:

(I'm narcissistic, as you can probably already tell, but I'm not narcissistic or motivated enough to dig up my old journals and know for certain what caused my Fall.)

#1. A Random Unrelated Book
I read Guns, Germs, and Steel, one of perhaps two nonfiction books I would read on my own in high school. The anthropologist author takes a surprisingly deterministic approach to world history. Seeing how circumstance could have spread any proto-religion (instead of early Christianity) all over the world was humbling.

#2. Proper Nouns in Genesis
Catholics, unless they aren't really Catholics, don't take Genesis literally. But I for one had a problem with the different names for God (one of which is plural) early in the book. Linguistic evidence points to a shift from polytheism to monotheism in early versions of the Creation story, I decided.

#3. The Voice
The last minor cause that comes to mind is the eerie sound my congregation made when saying the Profession of Faith. I wanted no part in that zombie conformity, preferring to pray silently.

And everything snowballed, and five years later I'm wondering if I need a "why." With no God, how do I move on?

It's, as I said, a problem. I think that I do try to be a good person; not every atheist is a sinful hedonist (though I do find myself more inclined towards hedonism, as well as elitism, now that I know there won't be anything left on my permanent-permanent record).

The part I can't help is being a jerk, at least that's my worry. Not everyone will get his just deserts, it's true, but it's in my best interest to act morally. It's probably even "fair."

Non-moral issues are what give me this potential problem. Could give me. There's little reason for me to be nice to strangers, under this system. There's little reason for me to be especially nice to anyone without a watchful God around (which has always stuck me as one of the weak point of Judeo-Christian morality).

So maybe I'll become a worse person. Maybe I am. Maybe, like that dead German guy thought, I'll have to suck it up and be a good person without a theology to inspire me.