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- May 31, 2005
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I did not write what follows and it may offend people as it deals a great deal with religion but it had a profound effect on me (it was writen by a good friend I have know for many years... they have nothing to do with FFXI)
Several years ago, I started college and found myself facing a very difficult assignment. I was asked to sit down and in so many words, describe exactly what I believe. My credo if you must. For the first time in my life, I was expected to take my thoughts, morals, values, standards and adopted lifestyle and articulately compile them into words that anyone would be able to understand. I sat there, late at night, the evening before the paper was due and was completely baffled to realize that I didn't know what I believed.
You see, I knew what I believed according to other peoples' standards but according to my own? I was completely blank. So what did I do? I wrote what I knew. I wrote what I had been told. I wrote what would be expected of me. The paper was in my own words but the thoughts were plagiarized, taken from the minds of everyone who had influenced me up to that point.
Since then, I have allowed myself to be open, to be tolerant of the world around me and to not be afraid of change, differing attitudes and unfamiliar beliefs. To learn about something is to not adopt it as your own. It simply means that you are open to the thought of expanding your mind, exploring new realms and obtaining what is in my opinion, the ultimate goal; a better understanding of the world around us.
Here I set, five years later, the shell of my former self but the inner workings of a completely different individual. I have learned to ignore the incessant bombardment of testimony of who has found what god and which religion has fitted their life so well. They complain that without this way of living, they would feel completely lost and without hope.
Why do we as human beings feel that we need someone to tell us exactly what to do? Why do we find comfort in something that we can't prove, something that we can't see and also feel we have the right to defend this age old hypothesis? Why do we hold others' beliefs against them when it was our parents, our families, our churches and many others around us who instilled this way of thinking in us from birth? Did we even have a decision in the matter? Did you parents ask you, "Sweetie, would you like to go somewhere and learn about something that may not be true but will be held against you if you don't believe?" Of course they didn't! Instead you were forced to listen to it at such a young age, it became necessary. It became something that, if not invited, would haunt you the rest of your life just for questioning that there may be another way.
I feel religion should not be mentioned, not one word on the matter uttered until an individual is of an age to make their own decisions. If religion was taught as a college course, a subject of which you have no prior knowledge, it would not hold as much ground as what it does today. When taught from birth, you know no other way of thinking. Believers around the world will argue that religion is a convenient tool for society control. And, yes, religion does serve as a good resource for giving people a proper way to live their life. However, at what point does religion take too much control? How can we even say that we have a legal separation of church and state when beliefs are mental, beliefs are fused into our mind and part of those beliefs forbids us from thinking otherwise? And I feel I have a right to judge on this matter when my own life is affected by such an atrocity.
I have accepted the fact that gay marriage will not be legal in my lifetime. To dream of such at this point is a waste of my time because until our government is made up of a more tolerant generation, we will not see change. We will not see our government respect the rights of every citizen of this country because of their unwavering beliefs. Other countries have already realized that beliefs cannot shape a nation. The people, the ones that we can see, the actions of others that affect those around us are what shape a country, not the idea that there is some omnipotent power that controls all in existence, that determines who is bad and who is good and how you must attempt to live your life in utter perfection just to be privileged enough to be one of the saved.
I do not hate religion. What I can't stand are the religious. The people who feel that they have the right to look at you and determine by their own standards, that you are a sinner, that you will be condemned and that their own lives entitle them to make this accusation. I know atheists who are more moralistically sound and stable than a 50 year old veteran Christian who has dedicated their entire life to what they claim is the right path. And what kills me is that every religious person in the world believes that what they put their faith in is the only way. They will agree that that they don't think it's possible for all religions to be right. With that being said, wouldn't it be more logical to agree that if they all can't be right, maybe they're all just wrong? But you see, there in lies the problem. Religion has no room for logic.
Now starts my credo:
I do not believe in 'meant to be'. I do not believe in destiny. I do not believe in fate. I believe in me.
I believe that our choices are the only thing that determine our quality of life, who we meet, the job we get, the car we drive, the home we live in, whom we share that home with, our attitude towards this world and any possibility hereafter. I do not doubt the possibility of a God. Without proof of existence, it still remains just that, a possibility. But I have also come to understand that we as human beings do not have the capability to understand exactly what it's all about. I find it humorous that we have explored more of outer space than our ocean here on our planet. We do not have the capability to understand our own home, yet we feel we have the right to determine what lies millions upon millions of miles away and make an accurate judgment as to where it came from. Maybe there was divine intervention in all of it. But why is it not a possibility that the same power which created all of this is no longer around? Maybe we really are alone.
Speaking of which, I also find it hilarious that some human beings have developed such a god-complex as to believe that we are the only ones out there. I'm not defending the existence of tiny green men, but I am defending the possibility that with as vast as the universe is, there is much more a possibility that something else is there than that God created all of this. The Earth and the universe which encompasses it is a special gift from something we never have, still don't and probably never will see and it was created just for us; six billion people who each have their own way of thinking. Find logic in that I ask you.
I do not judge people who feel that their life is a bit more complete when they have the guidance that comes with religion. I myself am constantly looking for anything that may benefit my life and further help me in making the right decision. However, I will not subject myself to living a life that does not allow for mistakes. I will not be forced to believe that even my thoughts can be used against me and is something for which I need forgiveness. How is that living? Without mistakes, we cannot learn a lesson and therefore grow into mature adults.
As I have stated before, I believe in me. I believe that I know enough of the difference between right and wrong to not need a complete lifestyle to guide my every step just to ensure the possibility that when I die, I will not regret it. When I die, I want the world to remember me as someone who helped people, who gave them good advice, who was there at 3 in the morning to listen and to help with whatever problem they may have, who made them laugh, who made them happy, who made them feel special and confident in the fact that there was at least one person in this world who cared, not as someone who would pray with you, thus asking you to seek help from something that you cannot see, cannot hear and never answers back.
I pay my bills. I go to work. I make the decision to do this and to do that. I decide to help people, to be someone's friend, someone's lover, someone's teacher. For several years, I have been the one to make the decisions as how to live my life, thus making me in control of what happens. I find comfort in knowing that I can look back at myself in the mirror, that when I speak, I hear my own voice. I don't even ask for help from my own parents let alone from something that supposedly hates people like me anyways. Oh, I know, I know. God hates sin, not the sinner. Yet it's this supposed 'sin' that keeps god from loving me unconditionally, which according to most, he does to begin with. Hmm. And how is it a sin? I want to spend my life with a man. I want to feel the comfort of a man's touch. I want the person I sleep beside at night to be a man. This is how I feel. This is the urges, the feelings, the hormones that race through my body. How do you control that? How do you turn that off? Why does the world honestly believe that it's a choice? Do you think I would choose to be hated? Do you think Matthew Shepherd chose to be gay all in the hopes that he would be tied to a fence in the middle of a field, beaten and then left to die? Which by the way, for those of you that don't know, he was tied to a fence, beaten and left to die, and that's exactly what he did. He died!
I will not pay mind to beliefs that teach me to hate! Nor will I stand here and be judged for who I am. I am GAY! Not a mass-murderer. I will not stand for being told that I can go to church every Sunday, read my bible daily, pray daily, live my life according to Christ yet if I decide to spend my life with a man, I am still guaranteed a one-way ticket to hell. DOES THIS MAKE SENSE TO ANYONE? If so, I beg you to elaborate. I beg you to tell this supposed lost queer exactly what he's missing.
There is no point to what I have had to say here other than to make myself feel better. I am also not asking for change. Our religious beliefs shape the type of person we become and that is not something that most are willing to mess with. However, I will not feel that the only thing I've been told is the right answer. I also will not feel like a hypocrite and judge something before taking ample enough time to understand all aspects, all views and points of the subject. It's the same as those of us who feel we have the right to bitch about our president, yet we don't take one day out of 4 years to go decide who that president will be. If you're not willing to make change happen and understand something all because you want to know for sure, then I pity your outlook on life.
(signature of writer removed)
-Strange is our situation here on Earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that man is here for the sake of other men – above all for those upon who smiles and well-being our own happiness depends.-
Several years ago, I started college and found myself facing a very difficult assignment. I was asked to sit down and in so many words, describe exactly what I believe. My credo if you must. For the first time in my life, I was expected to take my thoughts, morals, values, standards and adopted lifestyle and articulately compile them into words that anyone would be able to understand. I sat there, late at night, the evening before the paper was due and was completely baffled to realize that I didn't know what I believed.
You see, I knew what I believed according to other peoples' standards but according to my own? I was completely blank. So what did I do? I wrote what I knew. I wrote what I had been told. I wrote what would be expected of me. The paper was in my own words but the thoughts were plagiarized, taken from the minds of everyone who had influenced me up to that point.
Since then, I have allowed myself to be open, to be tolerant of the world around me and to not be afraid of change, differing attitudes and unfamiliar beliefs. To learn about something is to not adopt it as your own. It simply means that you are open to the thought of expanding your mind, exploring new realms and obtaining what is in my opinion, the ultimate goal; a better understanding of the world around us.
Here I set, five years later, the shell of my former self but the inner workings of a completely different individual. I have learned to ignore the incessant bombardment of testimony of who has found what god and which religion has fitted their life so well. They complain that without this way of living, they would feel completely lost and without hope.
Why do we as human beings feel that we need someone to tell us exactly what to do? Why do we find comfort in something that we can't prove, something that we can't see and also feel we have the right to defend this age old hypothesis? Why do we hold others' beliefs against them when it was our parents, our families, our churches and many others around us who instilled this way of thinking in us from birth? Did we even have a decision in the matter? Did you parents ask you, "Sweetie, would you like to go somewhere and learn about something that may not be true but will be held against you if you don't believe?" Of course they didn't! Instead you were forced to listen to it at such a young age, it became necessary. It became something that, if not invited, would haunt you the rest of your life just for questioning that there may be another way.
I feel religion should not be mentioned, not one word on the matter uttered until an individual is of an age to make their own decisions. If religion was taught as a college course, a subject of which you have no prior knowledge, it would not hold as much ground as what it does today. When taught from birth, you know no other way of thinking. Believers around the world will argue that religion is a convenient tool for society control. And, yes, religion does serve as a good resource for giving people a proper way to live their life. However, at what point does religion take too much control? How can we even say that we have a legal separation of church and state when beliefs are mental, beliefs are fused into our mind and part of those beliefs forbids us from thinking otherwise? And I feel I have a right to judge on this matter when my own life is affected by such an atrocity.
I have accepted the fact that gay marriage will not be legal in my lifetime. To dream of such at this point is a waste of my time because until our government is made up of a more tolerant generation, we will not see change. We will not see our government respect the rights of every citizen of this country because of their unwavering beliefs. Other countries have already realized that beliefs cannot shape a nation. The people, the ones that we can see, the actions of others that affect those around us are what shape a country, not the idea that there is some omnipotent power that controls all in existence, that determines who is bad and who is good and how you must attempt to live your life in utter perfection just to be privileged enough to be one of the saved.
I do not hate religion. What I can't stand are the religious. The people who feel that they have the right to look at you and determine by their own standards, that you are a sinner, that you will be condemned and that their own lives entitle them to make this accusation. I know atheists who are more moralistically sound and stable than a 50 year old veteran Christian who has dedicated their entire life to what they claim is the right path. And what kills me is that every religious person in the world believes that what they put their faith in is the only way. They will agree that that they don't think it's possible for all religions to be right. With that being said, wouldn't it be more logical to agree that if they all can't be right, maybe they're all just wrong? But you see, there in lies the problem. Religion has no room for logic.
Now starts my credo:
I do not believe in 'meant to be'. I do not believe in destiny. I do not believe in fate. I believe in me.
I believe that our choices are the only thing that determine our quality of life, who we meet, the job we get, the car we drive, the home we live in, whom we share that home with, our attitude towards this world and any possibility hereafter. I do not doubt the possibility of a God. Without proof of existence, it still remains just that, a possibility. But I have also come to understand that we as human beings do not have the capability to understand exactly what it's all about. I find it humorous that we have explored more of outer space than our ocean here on our planet. We do not have the capability to understand our own home, yet we feel we have the right to determine what lies millions upon millions of miles away and make an accurate judgment as to where it came from. Maybe there was divine intervention in all of it. But why is it not a possibility that the same power which created all of this is no longer around? Maybe we really are alone.
Speaking of which, I also find it hilarious that some human beings have developed such a god-complex as to believe that we are the only ones out there. I'm not defending the existence of tiny green men, but I am defending the possibility that with as vast as the universe is, there is much more a possibility that something else is there than that God created all of this. The Earth and the universe which encompasses it is a special gift from something we never have, still don't and probably never will see and it was created just for us; six billion people who each have their own way of thinking. Find logic in that I ask you.
I do not judge people who feel that their life is a bit more complete when they have the guidance that comes with religion. I myself am constantly looking for anything that may benefit my life and further help me in making the right decision. However, I will not subject myself to living a life that does not allow for mistakes. I will not be forced to believe that even my thoughts can be used against me and is something for which I need forgiveness. How is that living? Without mistakes, we cannot learn a lesson and therefore grow into mature adults.
As I have stated before, I believe in me. I believe that I know enough of the difference between right and wrong to not need a complete lifestyle to guide my every step just to ensure the possibility that when I die, I will not regret it. When I die, I want the world to remember me as someone who helped people, who gave them good advice, who was there at 3 in the morning to listen and to help with whatever problem they may have, who made them laugh, who made them happy, who made them feel special and confident in the fact that there was at least one person in this world who cared, not as someone who would pray with you, thus asking you to seek help from something that you cannot see, cannot hear and never answers back.
I pay my bills. I go to work. I make the decision to do this and to do that. I decide to help people, to be someone's friend, someone's lover, someone's teacher. For several years, I have been the one to make the decisions as how to live my life, thus making me in control of what happens. I find comfort in knowing that I can look back at myself in the mirror, that when I speak, I hear my own voice. I don't even ask for help from my own parents let alone from something that supposedly hates people like me anyways. Oh, I know, I know. God hates sin, not the sinner. Yet it's this supposed 'sin' that keeps god from loving me unconditionally, which according to most, he does to begin with. Hmm. And how is it a sin? I want to spend my life with a man. I want to feel the comfort of a man's touch. I want the person I sleep beside at night to be a man. This is how I feel. This is the urges, the feelings, the hormones that race through my body. How do you control that? How do you turn that off? Why does the world honestly believe that it's a choice? Do you think I would choose to be hated? Do you think Matthew Shepherd chose to be gay all in the hopes that he would be tied to a fence in the middle of a field, beaten and then left to die? Which by the way, for those of you that don't know, he was tied to a fence, beaten and left to die, and that's exactly what he did. He died!
I will not pay mind to beliefs that teach me to hate! Nor will I stand here and be judged for who I am. I am GAY! Not a mass-murderer. I will not stand for being told that I can go to church every Sunday, read my bible daily, pray daily, live my life according to Christ yet if I decide to spend my life with a man, I am still guaranteed a one-way ticket to hell. DOES THIS MAKE SENSE TO ANYONE? If so, I beg you to elaborate. I beg you to tell this supposed lost queer exactly what he's missing.
There is no point to what I have had to say here other than to make myself feel better. I am also not asking for change. Our religious beliefs shape the type of person we become and that is not something that most are willing to mess with. However, I will not feel that the only thing I've been told is the right answer. I also will not feel like a hypocrite and judge something before taking ample enough time to understand all aspects, all views and points of the subject. It's the same as those of us who feel we have the right to bitch about our president, yet we don't take one day out of 4 years to go decide who that president will be. If you're not willing to make change happen and understand something all because you want to know for sure, then I pity your outlook on life.
(signature of writer removed)
-Strange is our situation here on Earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that man is here for the sake of other men – above all for those upon who smiles and well-being our own happiness depends.-
