Good God!

Funny the things that inspire you or make you think. I was just sitting here watching Family Guy, the one where Brian meets an atheist girl, and he identifies himself as an atheist as well. My thoughts, elongated, came out to something like: oh, I appreciate that joke, because I can relate to it, because there just aren't many people out there who think the way I think. And then I thought, but is that the way I think? I'm not even sure sometimes.

Being an atheist has always struck me as kind of a hard-line position to take. Not that there's anything wrong with it, of course, but do I want to take that kind of stand? Then again, agnostics tend to strike me as wishy-washy (though not always--Bill Maher, for instance, is the first one to admit that he doesn't know if there is a God or not, but he is far from ambivalent on the matter). And then again, does it matter how anyone else perceives the matter, or what they believe? No, it doesn't, and it shouldn't, at least not in the universal sense. Ultimately, what matters to me is how I feel about it. Now, most people who know me at all know that I tend to have strong opinions about almost everything, and strong opinions are (for me, at least) representative of strong belief. This is one thing, though, that I don't feel strongly about one way or another, at least in some aspects.

I'm a big fan of Darwinism, social and otherwise, and I typically allow science to inform my beliefs, on account of the empirical evidence and all that stuff. Most science-type people tend towards atheism, but I for one am of the belief that and understanding of and agreement with science does not necessarily preclude the existence of God, or some sort of higher being. Frankly, though, I think I am in the same camp as Mr. Maher. I just don't know. I will say this, though. I think that there is some sort of power at work in the universe, one that dispenses karma with some degree of accuracy. More to the point, I very much do not care for the God of any belief system which espouses bigotry, intolerance, violence, and hate. If there is a God, and it is the God of such a religion, that is a God that I will cheerfully denounce. Of course, I can do without most religions anyway. Any good God would be more interested in people just being cool to each other than in all of those people dividing up into groups and fighting each other until they're all dead. Unfortunately, to look at the world as it exists today, it is difficult to conclude anything other than that there is no God, or if there is, he/she is either very incompetent or simply doesn't care (credit me not for that assessment, but I do buy the argument).

Interesting...