By Dean Haspiel
I don’t believe in God.
Never did.
I’m 44 years old now.
By the time I’m 50 I hope to be able to impart some kind of wisdom from my life experiences.
I hope I have something more to say than I already have.
I don’t believe in God but believing in something; people, art, things, stories, time, the ocean, stars, etc…
…I believe that believing in something — is God.
It doesn’t have to come from a book. God can come from an event. God can come from figuring something out or learning that the older we get, the less we know. God can be as vague as clarity.
God is what you make it.
God is a tree, a river, the sky, a comic book character, a great ant or your great aunt.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.
It doesn’t matter where God comes from. Just as long as you believe in something, therein lives Your God.
So, in fact, you probably do believe in God because you probably believe in something.
And, so do I.
My mother was Catholic. My father a Jew.
I was baptized an Episcopalian.
Don’t really know why. My family never practiced anything religious.
I never stepped foot in a church to pray or confess.
I thought THE TEN COMMANDMENTS was a cool movie when I was a kid [still do] but certain events in my life told me there was no God. At least, there was no particular God I could count on or made sense to me.
My comic books had much more satisfactory answers to asking the big questions, “what’s out there?” and “why are we here?”
Comic Books were my Bible. My mythology.
However, as I grew up, it disturbed me to hear/see people use and abuse the idea of God.
It seemed self-serving.
Then it hit me. Of course it’s self-serving.
God is what you make of it.
Some people need God and some don’t but there is something bigger than all of us that made this happen no matter how much we had a hand in it.
Whether it’s science or some kind of power or chaos, we didn’t just happen no matter how well we trace our history.
When the glass is half full or half empty, we often beg or thank something when it’s too big to assign or define.
My God is probably different from Your God and I’m okay with that.
Just, please, don’t shove Your God down my throat and don’t start a war over it because of our inherent differences.
“Mom” and “Sandwich” probably mean different things to each of us, too.
Yup, but then God isn’t the problem, it’s Religion .
Nice one Dean. I agree wholeheartedly.
@Simon: Religion is like a penis. It’s o.k. to have one, it’s o.k. to be proud of it, but if you’re gonna try to shove it down my throat, we’re gonna have a problem.
God is the biggest murder in the bible. He turns people to stone, tells a guy to kill his son, kills every first born Egyptian kid, and at some point wipes out everybody and every creature that’s not on the boat with Noah.
Forget the argument that it’s all fairy tales and horror stories, God comes off like some cosmic abusive father.
If God were a super being, why would he even bother with us? Why would he care? And what would he get out of the relationship? It’d be like you wanted an anthill to pray to you and do as you said, and then when they didn’t, because they were ants, you turned a garden hose on them. It’s all just nonsense and people need to stop behaving like it’s the 14th century.