My Sanity and Respect for Religion.

First I’d like to say that English is not my mothers tongue so excuse all mistakes in my text relating to grammar and punctuation.

I have regrets in my life; a big regret is me choosing not to be a good student back in the days (dear Darwin, it’s difficult to admit that, but blaming someone else makes you repeat your mistakes, and it makes you feel powerless). I thought that I could get by without a higher education (…hate myself so much right now), so I did the bare minimum demanded from me (except for German  I always got the highest grades possible in German  even though I’ve probably forgotten most of it now), and never pushed myself further. 

There were two courses I was particularly bad at (“courses” is the right word, right?); Math and what I think is called Natural Sciences in English  The reason I sucked at those subjects was primarily a lack of interest, as well as a boring teacher, which are shitty reasons to fail at any subject, but I digress. During the summer of -07 I, for some reason, got interested in evolution, and searched deep and wide in the depths of the internet (i.e. I used Youtube) for evolution related material. I quickly found The Blind Watchmaker, a documentary based on the book by Richard Dawkins, which made me fall in love with evolution, and soon after watching it I fell in love with Dawkins’ mission to fight religion. 

Dawkins is a very charismatic guy, who knows how to argue well; the same can be said about people like Hitchens, and Sam Harris. I had a blast listening to them for God knows how many hours; the same can be said about science popularizers such as Carl Sagan (COSMOS IS SO AMAZING), Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Michio Kaku. Learning about the world around me, and hearing people argue is what I love; I love learning, and what better things to learn about than the Cosmos, with its grandness; Black Holes, with their power; evolution, with it’s ability to explain complexity, while at the same time being to simple? God, I loved watching all those documentaries, lectures, and debates back in the day; there was this video on youtube, about an enormous simulation of the universe; it was accompanied by some mesmerizing music, including Learning to Fly,  by Pink Floyd. THAT SIMULATION BLEW MY MIND! It was magic! Incredible! Reliving that moment and those feelings of wonder and awesomeness forever would be my heaven. 

Now, some of you might read what I just wrote and ask yourselves “Loved watching? So what happened?” Let me tell you what happened: My MIND happened. In the early months of -09 I had a mental collapse; It might seem ridiculous to some of you, but I had some Descartes-esque (is that a proper word?) doubt, that I just couldn't get out of my head; I started being hyper skeptical of everything related to science, and it drove me MAD: How do I know this or  that? How do I know that I know? The questions almost made my mind break, and I had to abandon thinking about science, which made a huge dent in my life, because what would I do without the thing I loved so much? What would I do? What could I do? Luckily, I had just discovered internet series such such as Nostalgia Critic, which distracted me from my thoughts, and which provided me with plenty of joy. Later on I rediscovered politics (I had been engaged in politics earlier in my life), which I started to love, and still love even to this day. 

Now, let me talk about religion. I dislike religion; religion like sand in your eyes, that makes it impossible to see properly, and it’s the source of so much pain, even here in the west. However, recently I have gotten more respect for the religiosity of others than I had earlier; from the early days of my passionate feelings for atheism I knew that some people believed in god because life is hard, and that they need religion to cope with life; I didn't feel respect for such things at all. “What kind of idiot would lie to him- or herself just because life is too hard?” I’d think to myself, but recently I've been going through some rough times, and I get it now; life is hard. I can understand, on an emotional level, why people want to believe in life after death, and why they deny the arguments against believing in god; I respect religious people to a greater extent than I previously did, even though I will still fight for enlightenment. Does that make sense? I hope so. Just thinking about all the children who have lost a parent to cancer makes me sad. The other day I read about that hurricane that hit the american east coast, and just reading the headlines about dead people made me teary-eyed (I can surprise myself sometimes with my emotions). 

Man, it feels kind of good writing and thinking about your feelings. When I first realized that I had found some respect for the need for god I felt kind of good. Holding something in high, or at least higher, regard feels good. 

I hope you've enjoyed my presumably grammatically incorrect, poorly expressed thoughts. Please feel free to share your thoughts (it doesn't matter if your posting a reply years after the post has been made), and please correct my grammatical errors (in a nice way mind you)! I’d love to get comments!