Adventures in Zephux

     My post yesterday tells of how I am constantly confused and can not ever make up my mind in almost any aspect of my life. I am going to further validate that fact by writing, now, about my religion. Let’s start at the beginning, for a very long time, I was a Christian. Of course, as an unquestioning child, it is easier enough to be whatever you are asked to be. My grandparents were Christian and took me to church on the occasional Sunday, therefore I was Christian. But, as I got older I began to go to church less and less. Then, one day, I just stopped all together, but I still believed.

When my dad died (I was 12), I began to go to church every week again. I rode my bike to the church down the street, I went to youth group, I even was a greeter for a while. Granted, this was in Florida, so there were not a lot of people my age around (the average was 60), but I still enjoyed myself. They were nice people and I liked helping out at the church when I was needed. I did this for a while and even got baptized there when I was 14. Now, I’m really not sure what happened. There is no real explanation for it, except that I would question the existence and possibility of the computer sitting right in front of me, but somewhere along the lines, I stopped believing. Maybe it was the fact that there is an infinite amount of space in the Universe and the odds of us being important, nay, let’s go with the slightest bit significant, to whatever higher power may, or may not, be out there was astronomical. I put the same argument to those beliefs as I do to whether or not aliens exist… Of course aliens exist, how could they not. The odds of no other life ever coming into existence in all of the limitless solar systems out there, in the probably limitless number of undiscovered Universes in the multiverse, is ludicrous. So, why would a higher power care for us at all. Do we care for ants? False, bad example… Do we care for the individual cells that exist in everything that exists? No, we do not. We don’t have feelings for each individual living cell in each and every living thing, So, why would a god possibly care for us?

On some days that is my story, and I would argue it, but only on those days. On other days, I see other stories. I woke up this morning an agnostic, meaning, to me, there could be something out there, but if there is I don’t know if they have any relevance to us. A couple of days ago, I would have claimed atheism, how could there be anything higher than us? And finally, more often than not, I claim Christianity… in a way. On those days I see our God, I talk to him, and, here’s the punch line you were waiting for, I think he’s a total douche bag. HA! These are the few religions I jump back and forth from. Confusing? Agreed. I can’t keep track of what I believe in any better than I can keep track of what I want in my relationship,  or what Operating System I want to use, or what I want to eat. If I could pick one thing, know I want it, know I will always want it, and stick with it, I would be infinitely happier.

What is the point of all this? I want something to believe in. I like the Christian faith, it makes more sense than anything else, again, I don’t much care for religious people, I feel they are very annoying, but still, the faith itself as fine. I think they consciously choose to act like nut cases. I talked to a very good friend of mine, who happens to be the daughter of a preacher I believe. I think what I actually said was something along the lines of I don’t have a set belief, but I’m open to hearing ideas. She had an instant suggestion, she said she had just the book for me. (FYI, it was “The Case for Faith” by Lee Strobel) After I couple of weeks, which I thought she was using to get home and borrow the book, she brought me a copy and told me to keep it. (p.s. Not going to happen, I will get it back to her somehow, or pay her for it. I was mislead by the illusion that I was borrowing it, I feel bad taking things from people.) This was yesterday.

I have since, meaning this morning, already read 50 pages of the book, and I love it. I’m not too far into it, obviously, and I’m not going to say it’s going to answer every question I’ve ever had (actually I’ve already written on down and stuffed it inbetween the pages), but it is bringing up a lot of the points that I have a problem with in the religion. I won’t go into boring detail, but my point is I’m thinking differently already. Why is this relevant? Well, I’ve decided that I am easily persuaded into different ways of thinking. If I go home and talk to my family (all of them agnostics) I start to feel one way, but I can read something like this and talk to her and feel a completely different way about the existence of everything. It disturbs me a little bit, that my belief system is so weak that I can, with only a couple of words, be persuaded into believing something completely new. I don’t like it.

I want to change that, I still want to know what I want out of life, but I think the first step is knowing what I believe, and then sticking with it. That sounds like a good way to live to me. Now, if I have doubts I can’t do it, so any questions I have I want to get answered, but I really want a set belief system. You can probably tell from my writings that from day to day I believe different things and think completely different. I will go as far as to say In a couple of days, I can manage to change everything about myself without even trying. Example? Back at the end of January I was into freedom of software and developers, I was going to open source all of my applications and reveal everything I know and actually try and get involved in the community. I changed my mind on that one real quickly. By later that week, after writing the randomness that corresponds to that thought process, I decided not to GPL all of my code and to keep all of my stuff mine. At the moment I don’t want others taking my ideas, modifying them, selling them, and making money off my creativity. That just doesn’t seem right, but do you see how much my opinion changed in no time, and computers are my life. If I can changed everything I believe about them and their theory in a day, why can’t I change absolutely everything? I can, and it sickens me.

I guess what I am really trying to say is, after 19 years, I want to know who I am and I would like it to be semi-consistent from day to day. I want to be able to tell someone what I believe, and then still believe it two weeks down the road. I understand that after years I am going to change, but I don’t want it to flip around from one day to another. I want consistency in my brain. Anyone found that Reality Controller yet?