My view of life:

Now, now how do I start this lightly.

Humans are animals just like every other animal. The only noticeable difference between us and the rest of the animals is our large brains. What do all animals have in common? They pursue selfish goals. Selfish goals to simply accomplish one concept. Surviving long enough to replicate and making sure that their genes pass on. Well, that’s the underlying biological reason for the selfish actions that human beings perform as a base of their everyday lives. We are selfish and cruel to everyone but our peers. We may not kill because we happened to have evolved to a stage where our brains recognise that coexisting with the rest of the human beings that we don’t really care about or like, is beneficial to our egotistical lives.

There’s nothing higher than me and my life is substantially of a greater worth than everyone else’s. That’s how everyone sees it. I serve no greater purpose to the universe. I exist because I exist and I had no choice in the matter. I am here because of random chance that out of billion of other probabilities resulted in me, as it resulted to you and as it resulted to every other person on the planet. Your life is sacred because I consider my life sacred too. But my life is more sacred than yours.

All that I am and all that I currently express exists just because I have a brain with an accumulation of nerves fired in the right order due to my so far experiences. What I am is lost once my brain is gone. There’s no magic in who I am, rather than a sequence of events that given a chance to occur again in a similar manner in a similar setting with similar people at the same time and temperature with the same genetic makeup and phenotype would result in the same me. It’s not magic it’s just a mathematical probability that’s unlikely but not completely improbable to occur again. The answer is close to zero but not exactly zero.

I am unique though because of that great improbability and as such I act as though I am the only one of my species. I am the only one that can understand me and sometimes can’t. Like you are the only one that really knows what’s happening inside your head.

The world exists only because I exist. It would be stupid of me to say that the world will not continue if I disappeared tomorrow, because it would. But for me that would be of no worth or meaning.

I am not sure everyone listens to the same sound or sees the same colours when they are reproduced inside the brain, because there should certainly be variations of it. But we can’t objectively discover what those differences are or ever find out.

What’s the mystery of life?

The only mystery for me is how intelligent people can’t see the purposelessness of it all and the uselessness of their actions. It is hard for me to understand how I can still grasp concepts of love and experience feelings that have no logic to back them up. I find it weird that I want to have a family when deep down I know that who I am is going to be lost forever and even though logically I am all that should matter for me, for my world, I have a tendency to seek human attention, affection and have goals oriented towards achieving that attention and affection as well as pursue having a family one day. I actually find it a hard reality to live in now. I feel that too many people are intelligent enough and smart enough to see that in the long term nothing really matters. People like that are predestined to sadness and sorrow in their lives just because they can see more than we as animals should be capable of seeing at this point in time.

The real mystery of life is why do people keep on living and waking up the next day when they know what their end result would be. Why do people care what happens in their reality as that reality along with the entire existence of the world is going to go after them.

As an ape I know why I need to reproduce and start a family and protect that family. As a conscious human being I see it as useless. It’s all temporary, it’s all sad and fragile. Just like we are. Incomplete, incompetent to fix ourselves and bound by a faith that was not of our choosing. That’s why we fight so hard to have control when we never really have control.

And I find it so hard to find magic in all this. You know some spice to make this life taste better or smell better.

I guess the only magic lies in the contradiction. Life or no life? Feel or think? Try to fix it or just let it be?

But in the end. I guess it doesn’t really matter where the magic hides, does it?

 

Response to a video.

First before I start I’d like to inform you that this is a response to Fakesagan’s video ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcVev_RKW6E&watch_response  )to Paul’s ego video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6H8c8R70UjI&feature=channel_page ) and he is basically supporting the idea that Secular Humanism is a cult who can turn to be dangerous( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_humanism ). Also before I go on I’d like to say that I wouldn’t call myself a secular humanist. I would call me a free thinking human that comes to various conclusions through thinking process (just like everyone else around here), but I guess if you’d like to label me you would call me an atheist. As for my beliefs I would say that I do agree with most if not all of the things that Secular Humanism supports but i wouldn’t go as far as to include me in their group. I would like to apologise but I don’t do video’s although it was suggested to me by a couple of people because I do not like the video recording process etc and English isn’t my first language and although I do have fluency I wouldn’t go as far as having to pick between greek/english words to get across what I have to say.

Cult (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult)  typically refers to a cohesive social group devoted to beliefs or practices that the surrounding population considers to be outside the mainstream, with a notably positive or negative popular perception. The word “cult”, which has at least eight meanings, has been a source of confusion.

Secular Humanism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_humanism ) is a humanist philosophy that upholds reason ethics and justice, and specifically rejects the supernatural and the spiritual as the basis of moral reflection and decision-making. Like other types of humanism, secular humanism isa life stance that focuses on the way human beings can lead good, happy and functional lives.

Secular Humanism is a philosophy it is not a cult. It does appear to be a cult  though when you see all the different groups and societies that have merged from it and as such I do get your reasoning on why it would appear to be a cult. But in the same way you wouldn’t go as far as to call Atheist’s a cult because they share the same philosophy that there is no god as the word suggests. In reality just like you explained it’s a philosophy just like Nitzche’s philosophy for life and just like any other philosophy. I would go as far as to extend it to the moral teaching of Jesus in that respect without all of the religious nonesense.

You say it’s dangerous because it’s utopian. The philosophy behind the idea of making the world a better place is always utopian and anything that promises just that should be avoided. I would like to say that I disagree with the whole idea of utopian principles. You brought up Marxism/Communism as an example of utopian system that came to be one of the most evil systems ever. I would like to point out that the system that was adopted in Russia was not the utopian system that Karl Marx suggested it was something entirely different. It was Bolshevik’s version of communism and it was edited to fit the situation and the gap that was left by lack of monarchy. Any system especially a political system must slowly be changed, at least in the consciousness of the people and this system hasn’t basically because the people were uneducated and the educated people were profiting by the monarchical system of the Tsar. Now Bolsheviks did just that and established a monarchy on communist principles. On the other hand I would like to point out that the current system of democracy that exists in the world is not a system where the views of the people is heard. In Ancient Greece all of the men (because women didn’t vote) had to vote on any issue and on any decision taken. Now people vote for other people that then take the decisions for them. Therefore the decisions taken are down to the voting of those people whose individual opinion might be lost through internal voting that occurs in the party as each party would support only one united view. Thus individuality is overall lost and the laws voted into place are in great deal against public opinion. It is however Utopian to think that for each decision public vote should be the one to decide because people don’t have the time nor care to do that. On the other hand it’s the right way to happen. Having this in mind I would like to explain why Secular Humanism is not a utopia. Because it tells you to look at the evidence and decide according to that. It doesn’t say anything else.

It is not wrong to hope for a better life and to seek for ways to improve the current living conditions and the world around you. It is not wrong to hope. Utopian systems fail only when they get abused and for that we have no-one else to blame but ourselves for allowing it to happen and for not being intelligent enough to stop it. And again Secular Humanism supports free thinking and free will which you support as well and so does Karl Marx but weirdly enough was not included in the interior policy of the Bolshevik party.

Secular humanism as you say promotes science and you say that in turn makes it hate all religious people. I do not understand the link between loving science and hating religious people. I do understand loving science and in turn thinking that religious belief are stupid – that I can see happening but the hate I don’t. It’s just like ideas, you wouldn’t kill someone for being stupid, you might explain to him/her why they are being stupid but you would never kill him for being stupid or acting stupid unless of course his stupidity is hurting you and by hurting I talk about physical damage and not sentimental/emotional damage. Because as we said Secular Humanism supports evidence  and nothing else and from what I understand your philosophy for life agrees with that.

I know it appears as though I am supporting Humanism and disqualifying your ideas but I am simply offering my point of view. I also agree that idea burying is one of the stupidest things ever, so is censorship. If something needs to be said it should be said. If we fear people are so easily malleable maybe we should improve the education system rather than avoid exposing the stupid and in turn go against the human rights and the democratic beliefs that we hold so dear.

I would like to continue with your examples of Authoritarian humanists as an example on how beliefs can turn to hate and maybe dangerous.  As I said managing to understand that using evidence to decide on things is not a hard concept to conceive and also the absence of god isn’t either. As you said ideas can be dangerous yes, and ideas can also be edited and changed to fit the beliefs that other people have. Yes it is easy to do that, but on the other hand it is up to us to spot the stupid. It is up to us to understand what’s going wrong in this world. It is up to us to disqualify the ridiculously stupid beliefs.

People are generally stupid and most of the stupid ideas will appeal to them. To give you an example, if you look at the people you hang out with you will see that their processing speed and ability to communicate are close to yours. So it’s easy to see that people with limited thinking ability will follow stupid ideas because they can conceive and understand them. It’s something that we have to live with. On the other hand though I wouldn’t consider Secular Humanism a dangerous cult like you do. I would much rather see it as an idea just like a boat of ideas that can never be seen to be right or wrong until it gets tried out and put to practise.

I hope I didn’t go too far off topic because this is something I do all the time.

Thanks  :)

 

I stepped on shit. But why did I?

Well to answer the question simply…  Because I wasn’t looking at where I was walking. To be more precise I wasn’t looking to where I was stepping at that given time, the time therefore when I stepped on shit. To be even more precise. But why wasn’t I looking at the time? Because I was doing other things at the time. What other things? Well I was sending a txt message to my friend. Why were you sending a txt message to your friend? Because I wanted to explain to him that I wasn’t going to go out with him tonight. Why couldn’t you go out with him tonight? Because I had to study my immunology. Let’s stop the questions here because it is infinite. I want to show you that by following this trail of thought and you get bored by asking questions to about this point you can come into the following conclusion: I stepped on shit because I had to study immunology in a future time. 

I gave that rediculous example because I wanted to show to people that as humans beings we have the pathological need to explain things. We always ask ourselves why did that happen, why is this thing like this and not like that? Why? There is a good reason on why we are doing this (Yes I know it’s sad that I have to explain why we feel the need to explain things). We are all doing this because it keeps as safe. The cause and effect of anything, if we manage to decode it down to form rules in our brains give as an advantage over people that don’t have those rules in their head. In more simple terms. It has been evolutionary conserved for the majority of human beings to ask themselves the question why. To ponder about things and find answers that they consider satisfying in order to put rules and laws that life follows. Life in this example includes the physical world. These rules may sometimes exist the physical world and extend to the paranormal world ie imaginary principles with no base in natural values that extend into having effect on the physical world. What this means is that when the human mind cannot discover rules, it creates rules that have no base or may have some base in reason and common sense, so that it can explain by the mere imaginative creation or by mere coincidence certain physical phenomena. 

There are countless examples of this phenomenon. Zeus the god of thunder, rain dances, virgin sacrifices to stop the volcano from exploiting, touching wood for bad things not to occur. We all have a thing/habit that we do that has no basis in common sense that we simply do in order to avoid or have a physical phenomenon occur in a predictable/likeable manner. Our own personal OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder).  You see for our brain something doesn’t always have to make sense in order for it to be associated. It’s a fale safe mechanism. It’s better to be safe therefore than sorry. It’s not logical, it’s based in the fear of the unknown/death as is everything if you take it down to the deepest level. 

What I want to do though is not explain why we are doing this, but to explain a different concept. One concept that most people fail to see in science. Just because as human beings we want to see reason in everything, it doesn’t mean there is always a reason for things that happen. Just because there is always a goal in our interactions with people and all our actions are governed by our futuristic aims, it doesn’t mean that nature, the universe or even the events happening all around us work like that. I heard from a guy at the university that when he looks at a problem from a physiological prospective, ie when he is looking for the function of anything in the body he is looking at it from the point of view, of why would god place it there. What reason did he have to put it there. What function would it serve in order for it to be there. You see what people and most people fail to see is that most things happen by accident. MOST things happen by accident. Only goal seeking animals make things happen. You need to realise that there is no goal set for our genes. Things happen because they do. Our eyes did not develop for us to see. Our eyes simply developed because it was beneficial for the body to have it.

What do I mean by that… Let’s imagine that I am god for example, I am not skipping evolution I am just doing it hell fast. Back to the example, I am god. I see animals that eat each other up with no eyes. Suddenly I throw 1 pair of eyes on one guy. I let the guy PROSPER and have childer and let his childer inherit the eyes until all of his species now has eyes and feeds on the other species. I feel sorry for the other species and I do the same for them. Now both of the species has eyes and the weakest species starts to develop tactics to avoid dying. For the hell of it let’s just say that it happens to be faster then it will run once it spots the other species. So the fastest of the hunter species will survive giving rise to faster children and the faster of the hunted species survives to give rise to even faster children. Yes it looks like a race. It looks like they are purposely creating faster animals.

Look again that’s not what’s happening. By accident something suddenly had a function. Let’s say I have a limited number of resources to spend and I do so by just blindly buying stuff and I get thrown into an island with those stuff, if by accidently taking a gun with me I’d survive, if I didn’t I won’t. If this is happening for billions of years this means that life suddenly appears as if it has a cause as you don’t experience the effect of failures of lost dead descendants. You only experience the successes.. This means that it appears as things have a cause. It appears as limbs have a role a function and a reason for being there. No. LIMBS came by accident and they evolved into having a function and a reason for existence when you look at it from the human prospective. Everything came to be by accident and everything obeyed the laws of natural selection which is just a biological law for a larger scale organic reaction. 

It doesn’t just stop there. We shouldn’t let as human beings our pathological need to try and give a reason into everything that’s happening. This is bad for our understanding and it’s really bad for science I think. What we should do and I think this is what modern science is doing. Is take what we have and explore what is happening and not try to explain or give a reason on why it’s happening rather than simply accept it as a fact. Just like physicists who create laws of the universe, they don’t try to give a reason on why the universe is as it is. They simply try to find the rules of it. Ie find the equations that fit however illogical with our understanding of the modern medium sized world. What you want to do is just find what it is that fits and works. Divise theories that explain the physical phenomena with no greater purpose or plan for them.

 

Laters.

Assisted suicide, is it wrong?

Before I start I’d like to say that I am studying medicine and that I have an exam tomorrow but when I stambled on this http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=bPS3pZGthw0 on youtube I couldn’t help it I had to produce something and put in my blog. 

Note: I am not going to give an unbiased view, I am sorry. I don’t have time and I don’t want to put an unbiased view on this. I will put my own opinion on the matter.

I believe that humans are creatures of free will. Certain individuals have a stronger sense of that free will. But in essence all people are free to do as they please as long as their freedom of will doesn’t harm the freedom of others. We all have free will but, in a democratic government we are free to express that will and we all do so every day by expressing our opinion, wearing t-shirts with logos, posting on websites, writing our own blog etc etc. There is also another concept that we all have. Our body belongs to us and we all have autonomy over our body. Autonomy which allows us to refuse medical treatment in the UK if we don’t want to get treated. As I said before, I am doing medicine and the central idea of medicine is to never do harm, and in biological terms the Doctors there are causing harm by assisting the patient to die. 

In the UK euthanasia is illegal. But it is legal for other animals if they are suffering with an incurable disease that is going to cause them pain and suffering. Euthanasia in that respect is considered the humane thing to do. And in all honesty it is the humane thing to do. You are letting your animal die pain free without even realising it is dying which for many people (most people wish that they would die in their sleep so that they would feel no fear about it) is the best way to go. In all respects though, euthanasia of a dog is worse ethically than euthanasia of a human being. The dog cannot grasp the idea of death, and it cannot understand the pain is going to get through and in a paternalistic way, we humans make the decision for it. Maybe if the dog had a voice and could comprehend thoughts such as these, it would choose otherwise, but since it’s an animal we consider it better (I know many people don’t, but I do) to make the decision for the dog and help it die. For a human being that decision comes after complex thinking. That decision for the person deciding to die is a long process full of fear, full of anger, full of of feelings of injustice but from what I get as the centre there assesses their psychological state never a feeling of depression so that they are consciously making the decision for themselves. So for a human being it is actually suicide just pain free. And the assisted part is in actually providing the barbiturate which depresses breathing and senses so you are basically dying a very pleasant death, in which by comparison to the death he was going to experience it would have been terrible.

But it’s not just down to that. If you knew you were going to die and you had a time frame for your death, wouldn’t you want your death to be in your own terms? In a setting that you choose, with people that you love and die without experiensing all the horror that is laid in-front of you? 

I will repeat it. In medicine we are told to never do harm. But we are told to respect a patients autonomy. We as human beings know that we need to respect each other’s freedom. We know that we have to respect the opinion of others, even though we don’t always do. But I don’t think that in this case medicine in doing harm. Medicine is helping someone have a pleasant and comfortable death. I know that doctors have a legal obligation to extend someone’s life as long as they can, but it’s their decision. If they could they would do it themselves. I feel that the doctors in that place are doing what every doctors should be allowed to do, when asked. It’s the right thing and it really is helping your patient. And since it’s their decision I feel that there is nothing wrong with it.

Also I feel that there is NO place for Religion on this matter. Medicine is based on science and there is no room for religion. Religion is solely allowed to play a role in the patients mind and if a doctor feels uncomfortable with it they should actually refer people to someone else. In this case it’s not a case where you need to report it. The decision is conscious, the patient knows what he wants and he knows what he is doing. And quite frankly just like a religious person, Craig Ewert even though an atheist, died holding just like any religous person his beliefs strongly in his death bed.

 

-Andreas

What is the purpose? Why really there is no point.

This is what I hear from most people nowadays. That I am a cynic, a very negative individual who gives no hope in anything, that I see no positive outcome from life. I’ve come to realise why people might be thinking that I am that. But before I go on expressing all my cynicisms and all my ideas, I’d like to explain that I was wondering about questions of purpose, of why I am here, of what happens after I die, of why do I exist now? I guess I did this not due to having too much time available but due to over-thinking and due to my questioning nature.

The universe therefore from my point of view, which is the more truthful point of view, is a purposeless place. The universe from the point of view of the universe it just happened, just like a drop of rain fell on my glasses this morning. It happened just like that with a specific simple beginning but it owes to me and to you no explanation why it happened. It most probably has no explanation of why it happened other than the physics behind it. The idea that I will find an explanation in the existence of the universe that it will give my life any sort of purpose just doesn’t stand. Because the universe is not me, the universe doesn’t care about me. At the level of the universe you don’t exist, from our point of view you are like an mere quark if not something less than that, that its existence or not doesn’t change me. so my existence or not doesn’t change and will not change the universe.

Moving on to a smaller scale let’s say our planet. Earth, our lovely mother Earth. Earth that provides the nutrients from which we built ourselves and our lives. Earth that provides the habitat and the place of where we base our existence. At this point I’d like to say that most of us are born and abuse the planet if not all of us. Earth provides us life and we are born and use the planet as if the planet owes us and not as if we owe the planet. We are born so stuck in our own realm that we do not even appreciate the only real purpose that we have the biological one. My death or my life doesn’t change the world. Equally like the universe the world doesn’t care about me. Earth doesn’t care about my existence, it will continue to exist without me.

Moving down to the people, to the world’s civilization. The 6 billion people that live on this planet. Equally these people don’t care about me in the same way that I don’t care about them. My death or my life, like their death will bring no change in my life. And if it does bring a change let’s say that the death of a person was the death of my friend, that change will end by me dying.

You see what people can’t see is that the world is not meant for them. All of us do think that the world is not meant for us, we understand that other people live around us and we accept their needs. But their needs we only accept so that they can accept our needs and so that we can live without problems. People can’t see that my life, is a mere product of chemical interactions of many compounds, atoms, molecules, that in turn didn’t come together by any purpose. Someone studying us from above can also make equations about our movements and predict our actions and classify us.

Being alive makes sense now that we are actually alive. Being alive didn’t make sense before our atoms came together and made us and it would certainly make no sense after we die. At a larger level we have no purpose. The question of what is our purpose and why we are here doesn’t have an answer. It doesn’t need an answer at a philosophical level to explain and give a purpose other than the predetermined purpose that is given to us by nature, ie to reciprocate and produce tiny replicates or half replicates if u prefer, of ourselves. My life really doesn’t have any meaning. Being afraid of dying really doesn’t have any point. My sense of self that lives inside my brain, by millions and millions of nervous pathways and synapses between them, will disappear no matter what when I die. My conscience will be eliminated and put away as if it never existed. And it will make no difference if it existed or not. We are so self centred that we can’t see that it’s pointless to care about living or dying in that level.

My death will not bring many people joy, hopefully but it won’t bring many people grief either. And after all it will be gone too along with every memory of ever existing. There ways to bypass this truth by believing in gods in afterlives, in monsters, in ghosts, in reincarnations. All of these are products of our fears, fears coming from our raised conscience and our appreciation of what the future holds for us.

But people tell you that you can enjoy the journey. The journey that will bring you joy. Well in reality the journey will bring you more sadness than joy. And you’ll remember more the sad times than the happy that will be a nice break from reality. As you’ll grow older you will find yourself continually more isolated. You will find yourself continually with less and less friends, especially real friends. You will find yourself with less people that directly love or have loved you as they will pass away. You will see everything that or almost everything that you built around your collapse, in terms of life, goals, people, your fake idea of purpose and you will eventually face your own mortality. The whole idea that the journey will be nice is a trick for people to live your life. A trick for people to do what they are supposed to do. Because let’s face it, life isn’t nice. Life has no purpose. Life is meaningless. Life is just something that happened. God doesn’t exist. There is no ultimate goal. There’s no immortal soul. There’s nothing that can make the burden of facing this life’s reality any easier.

But you see being human as we are we can trick our nature. Being human as we are doesn’t mean we can’t try to enjoy it. I don’t understand why, for someone that believes that there is no purpose in life, why I enjoy helping. You see I might deep down believe that my insignificance might become more of a significance in other people’s lives, even though those are themselves insignificant. You see for me I understand that the darkest hours is where any significance is accounted for. The darkest hours of other people, is the only way that I can see myself having any form of place. You see for me that gives me satisfaction, which is what it’s all about. Satisfaction not in the cheap sense of playing with my brain’s chemistry but in the sense of my brain rewarding me, through my conscience. You see for life to be enjoyable it doesn’t need a purpose. For life to be enjoyable it doesn’t need a cause. And for life to be enjoyable in the long term it doesn’t need you to worry about it. Because if there’s one certainty is the uncertainty of your existence and as human beings we enjoy certainty. So it doesn’t mean that if life is going to be evil with you, that if there is nothing to go after this, if when you die nothing really happens, if you are an approximated value of zero. Because like many zeros before you, you were born despite the probabilities against it and you exist and enjoy this level of self conscience.

Self exploration

House – “Right I’ll tell her that everything went on without her. Babies were born, people got married, thousands of people will remember the day that she got raped as the happiest day of their lives.”

“We are selfish base animals crawling across the earth. But because we have brains, if we try real hard, we can occasionally aspire to something that is less than pure evil.”

That’s the idea of life. That’s the idea of what we really are. Selfish uncaring animals that cannot foresee or understand the concept of life. We are animals that see everything from our own point of view, we live happiness in our own head, we understand people’s feelings by faking feelings or trying to look back and compare with our own experiences. You see everything in this world is selfish and there is nothing that can change it. We live our life trying very hard, or many of us at least, to acquire wisdom, power, money, something to make us happy, something to make us better than all the rest.

Normalcy doesn’t include happiness. It’s not in the schedule. You always have to look from someone else’s point of view. You’ll never be happy if you only had the minimum and you’d never be happy if you didn’t have something that other people don’t have. It seems to be that our happiness comes from our narcissistic nature that the whole world is about us.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BE5M8743a1s

in this video you hear wisdom and you see life as it really is. You see life from a different prospective, a prospective that’s real, biased that it is, still real. Because let’s face it the way that I see life is different than the way anyone else sees or experiences life. The main similarity though is that every single one of us sees life from their own prospective. That being so means that everyone has a different world in mind and a different reality that he/she understands. That in turn means that we as animals crawl about in the world looking for different things, but still looking for one thing. That one thing is what our forefathers were looking for, what our grandparents were looking for when they donated half of their genes to bring about our father and mother and the same concept applies to our parents and possibly for us. That one thing is called happiness and the whole journey towards that happiness is our pursuit of it.

Yet again as selfish as we might be. We do aspire goodness. We have a conscience, well not big businessmen , but at least most of us do. With that goodness/conscience that we have we do good deeds to our fellow human beings. But is that idea of doing good deeds not actually being selfish?

Big businessmen give millions of pounds to charity and yet, do so to have their name heard and get away with some taxes. Do you think that people just do these deeds because they do not gain anything from it? For example: Let’s say that A goes and donates $100,000 to a big charity organization so that B child in Africa lives a better life. Does that A man do that in order to simply help B? In most of the cases people who do this, do so to have their name heard as a big humanitarian, in the same way that big movie stars do so. If they don’t have their name heard they might be doing it to avoid taxation on that money because charity money are not taxed. The most sincere reason that someone might do this, reason be that he just wants to help the children in need, is that that action does make him/her feel better. Whatever we do, however we live our life at the end of the day that action does come back to us and does change our life a little bit. That be it we drive our world and our actions narcissistically with one man in the centre of the entire picture and that man is our self.

Another concept of our life other than selfishness is the fact that we are all evil. Evil in the sense that we are not good people in the way we think of good people to be. Our thoughts aren’t pure and certainly our actions do not reflect our thoughts, because if they completely reflected our thoughts and ideas, the world would be a bloodier, uglier, unhappier place to live in.

Why is this so though? Well we are animals. That’s an idea that most people forget. Just because we destroyed the natural habitat of thousands of species to change the world towards our likings, destroying the environment in the mean time, that doesn’t exclude us from the rest of the kingdom Animalia. We live every day of our lives thinking that we are better that the world belongs to us excluding ourselves from the natural order of things. Most of the times we live our lives without thinking or understand that our life could very likely end in any second. We made everything so human centered that we forgot where our evil actions come from.

We have distant ourselves from our past in so many ways: Be it religion, be it politics, be it living in houses, be it killing off any other threads to our existence, that we are now arrogant and think that we are different from all nature. We think that our actions should be pure and nice and depress ourselves into thinking that we should be acting as such and not feeling as such.

You know why humanity was never in peace with our feelings? It’s due to the very simple reason that our feelings do not work well with our big cerebral cortex. It’s true that we have reached a point in our evolution that our cerebral cortex is in opposition with our emotions. The emotions are things that were formed from our evolution that could point you into things that you really wanted to do or had to do. Feelings as such are sexual lust, love, anger, survival instincts. All these things exist in our brain at least but most of us live a life without expressing any or at least most of the above, and live with them suppressed in our heads.

This suppression of our natural instincts leads to many side effects. One of which is depression. Feeling of not being complete, not being happy, to constantly look for something and never finding it, no matter how our life turns out. Distancing ourselves from nature and putting a mask to cover our feelings and our desires has a significant affect in our happiness and in our actions. For example suppressing fear results in anxiety many times, depression, suicidal attempts and many times bursts of anger where the anger is at a level that cannot be controlled, at a level many times that is significantly larger than it would have been if we would have released our anger at the first place. The difference is that now we have more opportunities to be angry about and less opportunities to relax.

So if you consider that we are selfish by nature, have suppressed animal instincts it is very reasonable that most of us will have issues of some sort. Issues that won’t be resolved and they would show up. The weird thing is that these issues are beginning to emerge all the time and are constantly in the news. Teenagers raging and killing children in schools, rapes, jails are being filled with people, crime, increasing occurrence of depression which is predicted to be the number ONE disease in the future. We are not in harmony with what humans should be. We are not in harmony with our nature, we are not smart enough yet to effectively suppress all of our instincts without first having some side effects.

We have created and live in a society which doesn’t care about us because it’s selfish and greedy, that can’t love because it’s suppressed, who doesn’t have time for us and we don’t have time for ourselves, and we have pushed ourselves away from nature and anything that could possibly relax us. It’s no wonder we are unhappy. It’s no wonder we snap all the time. It’s no wonder that we see everything differently, that everything is wrong for us. This is not an excuse though for what we are. This is not an excuse for what we have become as a species.

We have the ability to understand the world. To understand and predict patters of phenomena we can’t even see. Yet we have paid little attention to ourselves. We have paid little attention in understanding the human being as we are and not just from the natural-biochemical-anatomical prospective but also from the natural psychological prospective that arises due to our evolutionary past. Psychologists deal with those things but they, as me generalise everything. They like me put everything in categories and try to explain everything with models. I am being taught some psychology in my medical course and I do not like the way that psychology works and as such I think there is more room for personal philosophy and personal exploration in understanding the personal needs of the individual rather than for the individual to look for advice from other people who frankly do not really care about what you have to say.

Ignorance is a bliss. We used to be ignorant about the world around, about how everything works, about how we were ‘manufactured’ , but now we are ignorant about us. We do not have the time for personal thinking and self exploration and do not have the contact with the environment that people used to have. So since the change can’t come from the outside it should come from within. And from within includes acceptance of what we are. Selfish base animals crawling across the earth that have to try real hard to aspire to something that is less than pure evil.

Divisive from our nature, but at least not stupid

 

I shall start this piece by explaining that I am too among the people who do not have the intellectual capability to resist watching tv most of the time. But I do not watch tv for news or any other sort of information. That information I receive from the internet where I prefer a different and a non-censored point of view to their argument. I am one of the people who is subjected to all sorts of discrimination, not because of the colour of my skin as so many other people, or for my height although some people might choose to pick on that if they want to but nonetheless I am merely average, or for any other sort of physical appearance deficit that they might pick up on. On the contrary I am a person who gets picked on about his views about life, about my views about people, women, men, children, maturity anything that can pass your mind. I choose to be different mainly because I think the majority is usually wrong and usually lead into believing false claims, so I usually pick to support views that are not supported by the majority of people. I do want to add that it does add a bit in my sense of ego, to feel a bit unique although lonely at times.

I want to start this by trying to make you remember how do you see people on the street when you walk past them. Do you see a black person as a black person, a white person as a white person, a woman as a woman, an old lady as an old lady, a child as a child, an annoying child as the annoying child? Do you remember their face? It’s a human mechanism, an evolutionary mechanism if you would like to classify people. Old lady goes in the group with the old ladies maybe one or two in the group of the annoying ladies or the super annoying ladies and so forth. People classify people according to their differences. It’s a discrimination tactic that exists till this day due to our evolutionary past. Now there is nothing wrong with where evolution has brought us but we have reached a point where our intellectual capacity must overrule the evolutionary past, since it’s this past that people use against us Homo sapiens in order to guide our mind and thoughts. What I was trying to say before is that, we classify people according to their differences and not according to their similarities because if you were going to classify people according to their similarities they would all be one big group of people. Because that’s what we are people. This classification into groups (discrimination) is something that can be taken advantage off when rulers of the world need us to be divisive.

For example after 9/11 the war against terrorism began which reminds of a religious war which happened in the past. It must have been noticeable in the streets that people look at Muslims, or people with long beards etc with suspicion. You see for the people, terrorists are personified as Muslims and in our minds Muslims are tanned, beardy, Arabic speaking, scary people. That’s the sort of picture we get and that picture creates this fear, that’s why I mentioned scary before, of that particular group. Now this effect can be taken advantage off when you need public support in starting something. Because when you start something there is no real need for public support as you have to carry it through. This is where I am coming at. The effect of the discriminating mind that we have, is making it easier for mass media and the government to control our thoughts in a much more efficient way than it was able to do in the past. It’s another kind of fear that people face, it’s not the kind of fear that people used to face in Communist Russia, which was fear for their lives, it’s fear of the unknown. Now that news can so efficiently be broadcasted and so easily staged, opinions can be shifted from one thing to the next in a matter of seconds.

This fear of the unknown, this fear of a certain group, comes in many forms. You see a picture is a thousand words. And when you have picture plus a thousand words to support what you want, propaganda cannot be stopped. This form of propaganda is so effective that is can be considered as the public’s own view point, as it is not enforced and is not obviously imposed to them. People can hardly pick it up. So how does this work? Well you have your head bombarded with pictures of horror of what those people can do to you for example pictures from 9/11 attacks. You have pictures of what they look like, not particularly nice pictures of them usually scary pictures of men with guns. You also have pictures of the state of life they have and then you fear for your life. You don’t want to be poor, you don’t want to live like them. Your life is not good but at least is not as bad as them, so you accept a few of your rights to be suspended. A few of your fellow citizens to be thrown in battle to protect you and you also accept all the extra stress that this fear brings to your life increasing your risks for many stress related diseases of which there are many.

Of course you can say we are intelligent people. We can understand when we are being lied to and we can understand when we are being played. Can you? Is truth something that as a species we are good at? We do not like truth, in fact our government knows that we do not like truth, and they know that instead of having truth we prefer to sit quietly at home, caring for our family, raising them to be able to live in a corrupted society, teach our children to accept lies, we even raise our children in a seemingly loving and stable home with no underlying problems. We choose lies over truth every day. We even choose lies over truth when we know that we are being lied to. Lies make us comfortable and lies are the root of everything. Because even though we might pick up when we are being lied to. We might be intelligent people, we might want to hear the truth but when we do, we can’t deal with it and we instantly switch off and accept the lies. The lies that will keep my children safe at home, the lies that will not make me fight for my rights, the lies that will not allow me feel as sad as I could when I hear the truth.

We are a sorry lot indeed. When we need a promise of an afterlife of meaning to be able to go on living this pitiful life, when we wake up in a home with no love just to pretend in front of our children that we are happy so that they can live the perfect lie, when we wake up knowing that I am not free to do what we want to and yet do nothing about it, when we deny truths about our past because it doesn’t make us happy then I can’t feel anything other than sadness for what we have become.

I read today that it’s a feeling that all the young people have. The feeling of wanting to change everything, the feeling of wanting to be a rebel, to overthrow everything that’s wrong in this world is young. It’s a feeling that you only hold for a number of years and then it dies out as you slowly realise that there is nothing in the world that you can do to change what already is there. There is nothing you can do to change the people who rule the world, there is nothing you can do to change your faith. You just slowly sit down and accept it. I don’t know if that is true because indeed I am still young and I am very immature in the most obvious ways. But I do not want to grow up knowing that I lived even my youth being a cabbage. An unintelligent individual who saw the world exactly how it was served to him and never fought to change it. I feel sick in my stomach most of the times about rules and decisions that people have, or by the simple sight of people where I study who instantly divide themselves into groups that share more similarities than they share differences. I don’t want to be just one of those people who do not accept people for what they are and see people for what they are not.

You see the root of everything as I said lies in the very basic concept in our brain which divides everything up. You’ll find it scarier that you have more things in common with people you think you have nothing in common with than what you think. It is not racism I am talking about here. It’s something else. I am talking about the controversy that although we are supposed to be one as society under one rule, and we as individuals do not impose our rights on others, we do very little to merge in and try to understand each other.

Stop discriminating.

Start living.

Do not believe, do not accept anything without evidence.

Wouldn’t you rather be stuck with the truth rather than with the lies that just make your life seemingly beautiful?

Fight for truth.

That’s why you can’t ignore the evidence

Why can’t a person claim that the evidence point towards such existence? Why is it selfish to presume that there is a god? Why can’t you claim that the earth is 6000 years old? Why can’t you trust the teachings of the church? Why does science offer answers that are justified upon reasoning that can’t be clouded by a mere book?

A person can never claim that he has such evidence because there is no evidence to support such thing. Evidence that they may present are miraculous healings in which there is always a perfect reasonable explanation to back it up or some holy books that were written by god almighty or something in that sort. A person cannot claim that these things are evidence because they can always be explained by something else. Also a person talking to god is not evidence for the existence of god, it’s evidence pointing towards a hoax or towards a person suffering from psychosis. Other such evidence include the assumption that since there are no evidence to back up the non existence of god, therefore there is a god. So in this logic, if I don’t know if there is meat in my fridge, I assume that there is meat.

It’s selfish to presume there is a god because we point towards the existence of such god which bases around earth. Earth might be our home and to us appears gigantic but towards other places and with the vastness of the universe, it’s just extreme to think that the whole universe and the creator of such universe made all this for us. The Milky way galaxy, our galaxy, doesn’t revolve around us, and yet all we see is us in the picture of the vastness of something so huge we probably do not have the ability to imagine it. It’s like the ants believing in god and that they are the destined ones, or our cells believing in such thing. Don’t you feel so small when you imagine, what you really are, a person among billions, who lives on a tiny planet lost among the vastness of this universe that we know nothing about? I feel small but yet still I embrace this and have made my peace with it, as no matter how small I am, I have the opportunity to try and learn as much as I can about this universe and do not cloud my judgment because of a belief to a supernatural being.

The earth is not 6000 years old. Any scientist who believes this is not a scientist. He does not understand how the tests are made and how the results are obtained. He is just a sad person trying as hard as he can in order to obtain evidence that point towards the existence of the Christian god. You see for such people science contradicts their beliefs and instead of doing the right thing and accepting the evidence, they just close their eyes and their ears and listen to the word of god… whatever that may be.

The very fact that science or the theories in which the dating of bones or fossils is used in other domains of science, not just geology should be enough to prove to people that they are wrong to believe that the earth is 6000 years old. What I mean by this is, that MRI scanning or theory of decaying and half life of radioactive isotopes is used in medicine as well. There people trust their lives on theories that they are actually rejected by them afterwards. I think that no sane person would actually see any connection between the bible and the age of the earth at least.

Why can’t the Bible overwrite what is proven by scientific research? Simple. Empirical evidence is always better than the word of the pope or priests. If you seriously think that that is the word of god and being as such cannot be disproven even if there are evidence against it. So therefore any discussion towards that issue would be unnecessary as you would never change your mind. As such you would agree in views that greatly support your world view or are more psychologically appealing. Well that’s not how nature works, that’s not how the universe is. If people had the same mindset as fundamentalist Christians we would be stuck in an age where the earth would still be flat. Where most people would starve, where all free thinkers would be prosecuted, where people would be dying from black death or any other disease. You see everyone enjoys the good life, but when it comes to it no-one gives credit to the people that actually created that good life for them. And those people are scientists who were prosecuted at the beginning and were putting their life in danger in favour of this free thinking.

I think that it is time for all people to open their eyes and see the world just like it is. To not accept everything that’s they’ve been told. It’s time for people to understand that not everything that makes us emotionally happier is what is the truth. It’s time to understand that in this world religion has no place. In this world free thinking and reasoning should prevail.

Is atheism for everyone?

Is atheism for everyone? (Question asked by a friend)

I will try to tackle this question in the best way that I can and in the best way I think that is possible to answer such question. This question came to us by me telling them that my father and mother are not people who are ready to give up to religion. This question came by understanding that some people may not be very likely ready to accept such views or understand them just because of the intensity and the problems that they faced in their lives. This question came to me due to the belief of different people’s tolerance levels of life.

I will answer the question above in a simple 2 lettered word. No and I will try to explain my views why this is so.

I will start to explain this by avoiding arguments put forward by Sam Harris, by Richard Dawkins and by Christopher Hitchens. I do not think that intelligence has anything to do with the fact that some people can be atheists and some people can’t. I want to argue that most people can just accept that fact and other people just can’t. It might even be genetics who knows, but the fact that we find in studies that a very high percentage of the science literate population is atheist is mainly because of the fact that those people were exposed to arguments against God and have finally reached the conclusion that a supernatural being is improbable and most likely doesn’t exist and have thus called themselves atheists, just like I did.

The main problem to arguments put up like that is that we ignore the fact that many great people that are extremely intelligent and can probably do better than you in essays, in exams and can understand science better than you can are actually theists and belong to specific religions. That is a hole in the whole argument because such people are people with very high IQ levels and are genuinely very intelligent to be able to understand and explain many of the scientific theories that we have now. I would like to note here that I do not think that anything with science is hard if you just put your mind into it and have a passion for it so I am also not a great fun of the argument that science is only for intelligent people. So moving on from that I do not believe that science literacy would never change the mind of these people. People who are genuinely smart and who are science literate and still have some room in their lives for god. By the way I just want to mention that this last sentence doesn’t make their continuation of belief a positive thing.

In my view you either can or you can’t be an atheist. You either can understand life without god or you can’t. God lays somewhere deep inside our mind, somewhere deep in our understanding of our existence and our reason to be. Some people claim that the only reason they have for living on their lives is god. Otherwise this cruel and blood covered world makes no sense at all. Their life who is evidently going to end makes no sense and has no meaning. For some people is different than other people but I think there are only two reasons why people need god in their lives. The first one is that some people generally feel as if the world needs a maker, needs something better than this because they look around the world and they know that this is not good. Some people need an explanation because their brain cannot comprehend all these atrocities and deaths as normal. You see some people are genuinely sensitive and want to have a hope that something better may exist. Something pure and loving, something that can infinitely make them happy and they find that in god. Even though these people are wrong and basically ignore that is just human nature, the fact that we can never be happy that is one of their arguments. The second reason why some people might feel that way is fear of the end. Fear of death. I think that some people just fear death so much that basically look for life and need life to continue no matter what the cost. The same with before people experienced so much hatred they just need their life to continue in a better place. They don’t want everything to be for nothing, they can’t accept everything to be for nothing. I can’t see why they can’t just accept that, I know that it was hard for me at first but I guess some people just can’t grow into it.

I call these reasons life tolerance levels, which differ for many people. I think some people just can’t live with the idea that god doesn’t exist and even if evidence were there to show that he really doesn’t exist, not that will ever be an experiment that will actually prove something that doesn’t exist, but I guess there are tones of experiments that can’t prove something that should have existed, they would still be people with faith. People just can’t accept it. If there is no god then what makes sense? Exactly this is the question that is troubling their minds. This is the question. They need sense they need reason. I guess their tolerance levels for life are just different maybe lower. I do not want to make this as a weakness or make it appear as a sensitivity. This is just how people are, and if people need god to get them get through the day then I guess they can just have god.

Some people believe that a god exists because the beginning of the universe needs a spark or a tiny bit of extra energy to start everything and that that energy needed to come from something or someone. That belief is not hard to change, it’s not hard to go a step ahead and understand even that can be an even that we quite do not know and do not understand and that a supernatural being is not needed to explain it. But for someone who needs god to make them get through the day they would use god to make them do just that. For other people the equation concludes the improbability of such being and as such the decision comes easy, for other like me the decision for the lack of the supernatural was even harder but for other people such decision is impossible and just can’t happen.

So yes atheism is not for everyone and I guess it will take many years for it to be able to be compatible with everyone and I guess there is nothing wrong with that as long as it doesn’t stop human advancement and scientific progress.

From Christianity to Atheism

Journey of an Orthodox Christian to atheism

This story is my story and is a story and is a story of how a person grown in religion and then grew out of it. This is a journey from how a small kid that would go to church every Sunday, that would pray to God before going to bed and believe strongly in God turned into an atheist. This journey happened in Cyprus where Greek Orthodox Christians exist and where the alternative religion is Islam which is portrayed as an invading force in the beliefs of young people and adults. This journey will show how a believer can have doubts and how every believer that claims that he has no doubts because he believes is wrong. I am writing this and take time off my daily routine because I think that people need to open their eyes. I am writing this because I believe that other people live or lived the same things that I did but went towards the other direction, I am writing this so that if anyone happens to read this, he or she would hopefully think about twice because closing his or her eyes to information and truth and go for the wrongly path of religion.

I was born in 21^st of May 1987 in Nicosia Cyprus. Born into a family of a paradox mix for my country. Especially back then. My dad was right wing and my mum was left wing and back then considering the divisions that existed and the blaming that was going on between the left and the right wing parties on who was responsible for the Turkish invasion of half of the island, it was not likely that something like that would occur. But people forget, people live on with other people’s mistakes and forgive. They wrongly forget but they rightly forgive.

My dad is a refugee from the Northern part of Cyprus, if you people are fans of Mr. Hitchens you would probably have read a book where he explains the story of Cyprus as his ex-wife if I recall correctly is Cypriot. My mum is not a refugee but she also lived the horror of war as one of her cousins went missing in the war and is now most probably believed to be dead. So as you can see as a child I grew up in an environment which didn’t encourage multicultural teachings. When I say multicultural I am specifically talking about coexisting with Turks, as they were the enemy and they still are to all the Greek Cypriots. So I would not be able to recognize the difference between a Turkish child and a Turkish soldier. We used to say a Turk is good only dead and stuff like that. You see patriotism goes together where morals are down and where a country desperately looks for a reason to hold on and fight back.

My dad is a Christian Orthodox and so is my mum. So I was taught in a very young age that the God is one and that his son was sent down to earth to suffer and die and liberate us from our sins. You see as a child I was amazed by all this nonsense because as you very well know to young children Jesus looks like a hero. Something close to Power Rangers or Dragonball heroes like Goku, I am trying to relate to my past so forgive me if I am talking about cartoon shows that existed long ago. But the difference between Jesus and Goku was that Jesus was true and although Goku did look much more amusing and far more interesting Goku was a cartoon, Jesus was real and he was god.

I had such a great fate in what my mum and dad told to me. Do not consider me one of those normal children that walk around and run around doing exactly what their mum told them to. From a very young age I was doing whatever was the most interesting. From a very young age I started to doubt things and from a very young age I started sharing my opinions with my father, my mother, my grandpa and my grandma. You see that’s why I still find it much more entertaining and challenging to engage a conversation with older people which can share with me the wisdom of their lives. But nonetheless I never doubted God.

It’s like I was sure that God is right. After all he was bringing comfort to me. It is important to state here that even though my dad is a very strong believer, he never enforced anything to me. He never told me you should pray, he never made me go to church well of course besides Christmas and in my name day and if you want to include you can include my baptism. But over all I was living in a very liberal sort of environment where reason was encouraged. That is partly to do with Christian Orthodox teachings. We were never told to not learn sciences, we were never encouraged to just look for God inside Christian Orthodox Church. We were rather told that we should look into sciencee and that we shall find God there and that god would be the same god of Christian Orthodox teachings. It does sound a bit arrogant of the faith, but at least we were encouraged to look and learn and find out about science and about the wonders of this world. So my dad also allowed that, he also believed that learning is vital for the later on survival, ie he would tell me that I should learn how to write and how to calculate and be very good in the career path that I choose. So did my mum who was always dreaming of me becoming a doctor (as she says only when she saw my true interest in science) and let’s hope I’ll manage to prove her right because it is a very challenging course.

And so I started school and at first grade I was taught to read and write and taught important mathematics and I was also taught about the story of Jesus and about the story of Moses. You see it was a very easy way to make people learn and become literate if you interested them in a nice story but also a very nice way to encourage children to become Christian orthodox. We were told that if we did go to church, 7 times we would be given a cross to wear and we would be given icons of saints. You see I was always very competitive and always wanted to win even at the most stupid thing possible and ended up competing even for that. I would wake up faster than everyone on a Sunday morning and go to the church. I would be so early that sometimes I would actually have to wait for the priest. The priest went later on to develop into a family friend all because of me, and my dad went on to develop into a very serious Christian again all because of me, but I’ll come to that later. So for all the first three grades I was always going to church. I was always there first and early and would help with the Christian practices inside next to the priest. I knew what was going on inside out and I was always praised for my strong beliefs. It wasn’t only church and the service that attracted me. Because as you know the service in Greek Christian Orthodox churches is given in ancient Greek and that’s very different from the Modern Greek we speak so it would take time and effort for anyone to understand, so imagine how it was like for a 6 year old. Nonetheless I had memorised much of the service and sometimes when I happen to listen to the radio or the tv of a Christian service I remember much of it and I can recall many extracts of it. Makes you love the brilliance of the human mind.

I was so excited by the mysteries that were carried in the service and so I wanted to become a priest for a short amount of time. My dad loved it, my mum didn’t. But nonetheless they were having fun with their faithful Christian son. I always wanted to help people and I guess I considered being a priest a very huge help towards humanity and towards the public. I used to think of priests as the healers of souls. This is largely fre to the very friendly character of the priest where I lived who would explain to me everything, who would come to our place and visit, who would help the children, who would encourage people to be good Christians which in his sense and in the way he explained it was just equal to people being good persons and good civilians. I still hold very large respect for him and he still visits and calls me sometimes and wishes me Happy Nameday and tell me to walk in the path of Christ. And so this love for Christianity grew and I would pray for my soul and for other people every night before going to bed.

Most Christians say that it is prayer that actually makes them feel close to god but for me it was the first step to doubt god. For me it was like talking to a wall. Well that’s most probably because I was talking to a wall. And because it didn’t have an effect. Plus being very well aware of what I was wishing for, I felt very selfish and bad because many times you would wish for things to happen over other people’s good. That began to trouble me, but it didn’t trouble me enough to actually lose faith altogether.

I forgot to mention that after some months I decided that I wanted to become a doctor because I could effectively see the good of my actions, instantly and that I could directly help people. Plus to tell you the truth I was very excited about cutting people open. You see my mum bought me theseks which were books for 12 year olds or something which portrayed the pictures of how the human body looks inside and I was astonished and excited. My mum knew that I wasn’t scared of these things and so directly helped me to have a great love for science now.

So after 6^th grade I moved into a private school that I passed the entrance exams. It’s a school where my free thinking was encouraged and where I was slowly and steadily began to drift away from god. I do not think that that school gave me just knowledge, I believe that that school gave me the ability to think for myself and the ability to challenge opinions that were never challenged. You see the more I learned about God the more I changed the picture of god. I was a deist at most by 3^rd form at private school, I was a deist but pictured the god that started the universe as the god of the bible. I would sit down and think and know that a god that loves everyone may exist, but a god that interferes with our lives doesn’t exist, a god that created us doesn’t exist, a god that created the earth doesn’t exist and the very idea that humans were created in his own image were stupid to say the least.

It was in 4^th form that I began to experiment with the idea of death. It was then that I finally realized that there is no after life, that this is just it or it was somewhere around und there. You see as a teenager and as a young man that I am now the idea and the concept of death frightens me. It’s an idea that I hate and despise and do not want to picture. Unluckily for me that idea never came out of my head and it was troubling me for so long, the same as the concept of god that I recently reached into that conclusion. I was thinking that maybe there is something that I can do in order to actually picture how death is like. Do not think that I tried something special, I did have near death experiences but I didn’t see anything and I couldn’t remember anything, so I tried to visualize death.

One night I just laid in my bed and I closed my eyes and started imagining that I was dead. I started thinking of how it is to be dead. I started to imagine that this is gone, that all my friends all my family is gone, I tried to imagine the lack of self, I tried to fell alone and empty. You might think I am not being serious with this, but this is exactly what I did. I did exactly this and I imagined that all this is over and all this is gone. And I finally managed to achieve that and then I tried to think of what is like. But then you get the ideas of nothing existing, no tomorrow, no love, no friends, no family, no self, nothing, pitch black nothing. Your conscience can’t take it, your body can’t take it. I have to tell that that experience was the most real experience I ever had, the scariest compared to everything that I lived. My hC rt rate rose, I started breathing really heavily, I think I managed to put myself in an anxiety state and that I induced on myself a panic attack. After that day I was sure that this planet is where I want to live and that this life is good enough, with everything that’s wrong about it, I still want to live it. I told my friends about my experience and talked many of them into trying it and many swore against me the next day, and many people told me that they don’t want to live that ever again. I specifically remember one girl telling me that I was a very mean person for doing that. I think that it’s one of the best things to try, if you believe and even if you don’t try it. Try imagining death, try to picture death, try to imagine no tomorrow and no conscience and you will see.

I did think that I saw how it is to be dead back then, and that my body couldn’t take the idea. Even if I couldn’t understand what it’s like to be dead, it certainly taught me a very important thing about death. It taught me that, it is the scariest experience and the scariest idea that a person ( a reasonable person can have ), it was so clear to me that most men couldn’t live with the idea of an end. Our brain is not evolved to accept death, our brain is not evolved to think of non existence, of no tomorrow, our brain is not evolved to give up, it is after all evolved to carry us through life. It was back then that I saw with clear colours that the existence of god is necessary. It was back then that I saw that god was the faith, the reason for people that had the same worries and the same questions as me, thousands of years ago to wake up and try to live another day. It was exactly after that, that I realized that people actually needed something, needed something to keep them going on. You see intelligence doesn’t always come with good things, most of the times it comes with a price, the price of knowing that your day will come no matter what. The price of knowing that death will end this earthly existence and put you back into nothing. That is why I always picture death with time before birth. Before birth I was nothing and after death nothing I will be again. You just can’t accept that in your sub-conscience. And instead of that you create nothing. And instead of that you accept the blatant lies that give you hope. It’s rightly that it was said “What is a man without hope”? I guess a man with no hope is a depressed man, it’s an immoral man, it’s a man who has lost in this game that’s called life.

Even though I did reach to all these conclusions I was still a deist. I was still thinking that someone should have started all this. Someone should have caused the big bang, someone should be there to enjoy this outcome. I could still not let go, I could still not accept that nothing exists at all. I could accept that there is no after life, but I couldn’t accept that a supernatural being doesn’t exist. Most people would ask me what’s the point. If you take after life out of the picture there is nothing there for most people. Well yes, there is nothing there, but for me after years and years, god and existence in general became a philosophical question. It became a question that bugged me. And if a question bugs you, you think about it until you reach a conclusion, until you find the answer that you were so desperately looking for.

It is important to note that, in 6^th form, when I was 18, I walked out of a school morning assembly because a religious group was brought to talked to us about religious stuff and I just walked out because I thought that religious teachings and people trying to bring me into their faith sphere was immoral. I was almost expelled but after some talking and some higher parties taking action the whole matter was settled. But was funny about this was that I was thought to have walked out because of supporting my Christian Orthodox views. I did no such thing, I walked out because I was supporting my views. I thought that it’s bad enough that religion is taking over people’s life, I didn’t want religion to take over education. I didn’t want religion to play a role or have any part in school assemblies. I didn’t want religious groups to try and increase their numbers out of naïve and young students.

I did explain my doubts about god to some close friends of mine. Also I did tell them that I thought religion was bad, even though I still thought back then that Christian Orthodox religion would be a good moral ground for child upbringing. You’ll be pleased to know that I have changed my mind about that.

I left school in 2006 and have ever since researched the matter even more. I am not an old atheist. I have been fighting this battle for a long time to reach this conclusion. You see I never wanted to accept it. Being romantic I guess and into literature and a person that enjoys poetry and even write some attempts of poetry myself, I guess it was harder for me to accept it. I guess it was harder for me to see the world simpler than what my feelings could indicate it to be. I am thought to be among the believers I guess among atheists, because I can explain feelings and I do enjoy the idea of love and compassion and do not always enjoy explaining everything in simple science terms, even though sometimes people need to hear the truth to wake up. I reached the conclusion that there is nothing somewhere back in 2006 and in my own words I knew that there was nothing up in the skies. I understood that for years I was just merely keeping an idea of god to explain the universe and then I suddenly understood that I was not looking at the whole picture. That I was just being selfish and self centred. I understood that the universe was much more vast than I could imagine, I understood that I am nothing compared to the universe and that my existence required no supernatural being to explain it. I understood that like every other concept and idea god was manmade. I could see that the universe would only be explained by science and not by some supernatural existence. I could see that everything we knew was even more mysterious and much more complicated than we already understood. I finally realized that I did not believe in something different, I understood that I was merely giving god as a name to the explanation of how the universe came to existence.

I was not shocked by my atheism, it wasn’t a very important day for me. It was a day just like every other and like every other day, I decided about something, it was just that this day I decided that I was an atheist after all and that there is no god.

After that I read Prof. Dawkins’ books and Mr. Hitchens’ and everything came into place. You see I had no-one to talk about this. I had no-one to share these thoughts. This whole journey was a journey with myself until I finally realized what I really believed into. The God delusion finally made things fall into place, and finally helped me understand that I am not alone. I understood that an increasing number of people questioned religious teachings and turned into atheism or agnosticism. I understood that for most reasonable human beings religious teachings should just be viewed as nothing to base any faith on and that different religions were used as just tools to take over the world or control the masses. You see the funny thing about this, is that unless you do some reading and try to research some things and listen to people that presumably know more than you, you cannot connect the dots. I would never accuse religion for religious people’s evil actions. I would never accuse religion for the evil actions of its leaders. But I was missing out on one very important point. You see in Greek church is “εκκλησία” which in ancient greek was people gathered together in a place. You see religion is nothing else but its people and without its isople religion is nothing. I could not just not accuse a religion for the bad things that are happening due to the very strict obedience of its teachings.

So this day I am an atheist, who considers religion as evil. I am an atheist who considers that there doesn’t need to be a reason for something to happen and that a reason shouldn’t exist to explain why things happen the way they happen. All there needs to be is, understanding of why things happen and that understanding comes with empirical evidence from science. Also I would like to point out that by being an atheist I haven’t dropped my morals, I think I continue to be the same person and I do think that in my opinion the person I am is good.