Raised in the christian faith by my family at a very early age, I was presented with a satisfying answer that could quench every bit of curiosity about life that I might of had as a child. At such a young age, the meaning of my life was clear from the very beginning - worship the christian god and avoid disobeying his laws, if I was to become worthy of entering the promised heaven. No further questioning of how the world worked was needed. I had an answer for everything that I needed to know. Those were the general rules by which my childhood was governed. After all, god is the creator of all life and had supreme power over it. I could not dare question his authority.
But as I grew older, and as soon as I learned of how vast and chaotic the Universe was, I started to ponder on the fact that there were many other different religions in the world apart from the well know abrahamism that my faith was part of. I learned that many different cultures through time had different beliefs, and each had its own understanding of the world. It had become more and more apparent to me, that religion was something completely natural and even necessary in our evolution. It is the very nature of our consciousness that demands an explanation to what it is experiencing. So when science was not yet developed it was completely natural for the primitive mind to use ideas that require belief, in order to understand a given phenomena that it previously had trouble making sense of. And so faith in general was filling in our knowledge gaps in order for us to have an understanding of life as a whole, and give it some sort of a meaning. At that point I realized that faith was really just a substitute for knowledge in times when knowledge was lacking.
As time passed on I eventually found myself slowly letting go of my faith, and changing the narrow-minded world view that religion had imposed on me with a new open mind for knowledge. I became rather repulsed by the irrational and primitive behaviour that religion can sometimes provoke in people, as opposed to the solid rationality that science is based on. After all religion is based on faith - believing in something that by no means has to be proven with evidence. It is something that you have to put your trust in and accept as true. Indeed, that was not a very rational thing to do in my opinion.
It is true that faith gives people hope in tough times, but it is also true that beliefs can be used for justifying cruel actions and serve as a catalyst in emerging conflicts. And of course, religion just adds another difference that separates us as people. So if I had to choose between personal comfort in a belief that has no evidence to support it at the expense of human misunderstanding, and living in a world with no certainty and a predetermined universal meaning for humanity, but also with no differences to separate us, I would choose the later.
Instead of using faith to govern my life, and use it as a means of understanding the world, I decided to endorse knowledge and science, for it is through science that we as a species have made progress and not faith. Our ability to understand the world around us is what makes us different from other life forms here on this planet. Nothing can illustrate that difference better than the accomplishments that we have achieved with science. We've gotten to a point where we have great technology that continues to improve ever so intensively. Ideas from the past that were once accepted as undeniably true have been proven wrong by the very kind of people that help start the scientific revolution. We should really embrace our special ability to study and understand if we are to seek a more objective world view, based on facts and evidence.
In the bible I was reading: "You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free." (John 8:32), but yet, the only time I've really felt free was when I abandoned the very belief system that the book was propagating. Not being bound to ancient beliefs and primitive dogmas from the past, and devoting myself to gaining more knowledge provided by science is what really set me free. And as I learned, knowledge is indeed empowering to a person, but also liberating as well.
Science, without a doubt in my mind, is the very thing that drives us forward. Only if we let reason to prevail in our lives and not blind faith, we can be our true selves as the evolved conscious beings that we are - driven by curiosity to understand themselves and their place in the Universe. Its not an easy task, but we should be ready to accept whatever the evidence suggests, regardless of what our expectations about life might be. When I first realized this, life for me had become a lot more interesting. We don't know everything and maybe we never will. But that makes it even more special. Life is just a moment which we all should treasure and admire for what it really is - a mystery. I personally find a lot more beauty in an uncertain reality backed up by scientific evidence, than a certain one based on faith, where everything is pretended to be known with no good evidence whatsoever.
As time passed on I eventually found myself slowly letting go of my faith, and changing the narrow-minded world view that religion had imposed on me with a new open mind for knowledge. I became rather repulsed by the irrational and primitive behaviour that religion can sometimes provoke in people, as opposed to the solid rationality that science is based on. After all religion is based on faith - believing in something that by no means has to be proven with evidence. It is something that you have to put your trust in and accept as true. Indeed, that was not a very rational thing to do in my opinion.
It is true that faith gives people hope in tough times, but it is also true that beliefs can be used for justifying cruel actions and serve as a catalyst in emerging conflicts. And of course, religion just adds another difference that separates us as people. So if I had to choose between personal comfort in a belief that has no evidence to support it at the expense of human misunderstanding, and living in a world with no certainty and a predetermined universal meaning for humanity, but also with no differences to separate us, I would choose the later.
Instead of using faith to govern my life, and use it as a means of understanding the world, I decided to endorse knowledge and science, for it is through science that we as a species have made progress and not faith. Our ability to understand the world around us is what makes us different from other life forms here on this planet. Nothing can illustrate that difference better than the accomplishments that we have achieved with science. We've gotten to a point where we have great technology that continues to improve ever so intensively. Ideas from the past that were once accepted as undeniably true have been proven wrong by the very kind of people that help start the scientific revolution. We should really embrace our special ability to study and understand if we are to seek a more objective world view, based on facts and evidence.
In the bible I was reading: "You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free." (John 8:32), but yet, the only time I've really felt free was when I abandoned the very belief system that the book was propagating. Not being bound to ancient beliefs and primitive dogmas from the past, and devoting myself to gaining more knowledge provided by science is what really set me free. And as I learned, knowledge is indeed empowering to a person, but also liberating as well.
Science, without a doubt in my mind, is the very thing that drives us forward. Only if we let reason to prevail in our lives and not blind faith, we can be our true selves as the evolved conscious beings that we are - driven by curiosity to understand themselves and their place in the Universe. Its not an easy task, but we should be ready to accept whatever the evidence suggests, regardless of what our expectations about life might be. When I first realized this, life for me had become a lot more interesting. We don't know everything and maybe we never will. But that makes it even more special. Life is just a moment which we all should treasure and admire for what it really is - a mystery. I personally find a lot more beauty in an uncertain reality backed up by scientific evidence, than a certain one based on faith, where everything is pretended to be known with no good evidence whatsoever.
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