Hi everyone! After a long time without putting my ideas into virtual paper, I'm back on track.
As you may know, I am not exactly a religious person. Today I've had one of these long and tiring but interesting conversations about religion with a very good friend who is as certain that God exists as I am certain that God does not exist. We've talked, and talked and talked the same way we've done other times, and, of course, we haven't reached a definite conclusion (again). I've only been an atheist for a short time, but since I stopped believing, I kind of started looking down my nose at religious people. I thought I was more intelligent than them because I had come to the conclusion that we are alone on this Planet. And I just realized how wrong I actually was.
It doesn't matter what we believe or what we don't believe. Because a belief is just a point of view on a particular thing. In this case, it is the view on the answer to the questions related to our existence: "Where do we come from? Are we something more than a bunch of thinking organic matter? Is there life after death?". You've probably heard these questions lots of times. I think that science can and will eventually give us the answers to almost all of our questions. In fact, it has answered many of them already, but then again, there are people who think that these scientific answers are wrong and that the right answers to all of our questions can be found in the Bible, the Koran, the Tipitak (that's the Buddhist holy series of books) etc.
So, if religious people are happy with their believes, who am I to tell them that they're wrong? Even if I do think they are wrong, and even if it is ok for me to peacefully debate with them, I cannot and should not try to force them to think the same way I do, because (as Bon Jovi said) "It's my life", and we all have the right to live and think the way we want to, as long as we don't hurt or interfere with other people's lives. I can give them the reasons why I am not a believer and, if they want, they can say: "Mmh, I find your arguments reasonable, I'm going to question my own beliefs". In the same way, a religious person might give me such strong arguments to believe in a God that I might question my own point of view on the matter. But it has to be a personal choice, it should never be imposed, and neither I nor the religious person shall look down on the other one just because he or she thinks differently.
We're lucky enough, at least in The West and other developed areas, to live in countries were we've got freedom of expression and freedom of beliefs, and we've got to accept that not everyone thinks the same way: something that you might take for the truth, others might take for a mistake, and vice versa. We will never reach a point in which we all have the exact same thoughts. And that is exactly the wonder of human diversity. If we all thought the same way, what a boring place the Earth would be! So be happy your own way, because happiness is not what other people say, but what makes you happy.
