Image via WikipediaI guess I'm an atheist. It's taken me a while to arrive at that conclusion. It's also been a very thought provoking understanding.
I don't believe that atheism is counter to spirituality. What I mean by it is that I don't think there's a God up in Heaven keeping a little playbook of who does what to whom.
I also don't believe in an afterlife. I think we get one life - the one that we've got.
I think it's a beautiful gift. I think it's crushingly sad how we often waste it. Wars of belief. Playing silly games with "money". Living in support of "societies" instead of individuals. Pretending that fame is somehow important and deserving of wealth. Pretending that fame is proof of value. Pretending that things are more important than lives.
I think the universe is vast and beautiful. I find it fascinating how we live in this reality that just gets bigger and bigger the farther out you look, and yet, when you look in, in at the cell, the molecule, the atom, the proton, the quark...it just gets bigger and bigger that way as well.
It seems to me that everything, everything that matters, is made of the same stuff. We are all made of stars. Yet, somehow, there are rules and laws that make these vanishingly minute particles join with other particles, and other particles to form bigger and bigger, more and more complex systems, and ultimately we end up with the vastness and complexity and wonder of everything we are and everything we know - we are both different and yet similar to the most distant star we can conceive; we are both different and yet similar to every thing.
That makes me wonder about those laws and rules - how do they get made? Is that the wonder and mystery?
Or is it the continual combining of things into larger complex systems - cells to multicells, through generations to mammals, through generations to people, through generations to communities, then civilizations...dust to planets, planets to solar systems, systems to galaxies, galaxies to...well, what are we a part of? Do we serve a purpose in all of it? Are we doing it well? What will it all become? Does the thinking we do about all of this help? Are we a spleen, or a brain? At any rate, can there really be any justification for the way we try to destroy each other? For the way we treat our environment? For the ways we challenge our future generations with tasks they may not be able to rise to only to serve our own self interests?
Not to me. But I also haven't got the slightest idea what to do about it.
I'm secretly (well, or not) nervous about whether you're laughing at this right now.
But if there's something that gives me hope, it's music. We reach across vast divides of culture and perception with our music. We participate in a wonderfully complex, beaut iful, strange system when we make music. And we show our deepest selves - our emotions, fears, wisdom, poetry, rules, logic, taxonomies... Harmonies. We get closer to something important. Don't you wish you knew what it was? I know I do.
