As for me, my dad, thankfully, when it was time for me to be Christened/baptized, said he would let me decide when I turn 18 whether I want to do it or not. He didn't want to force anything on me - neither belief nor the lack of it. He wasn't religious at all, but he also wasn't anti-religious. He was anti-forcing religions upon someone. He answered all of my questions on religion almost diplomatically.
So that's one of the reasons I'm not religious now. I had a couple of moments when I did want to become a priest when I grow up (I was 6) because the girl I liked had a father who was a priest. But I did tell her I was not religious even at the age of 6. Later on, in my ultra-patriotic years, I was also thinking I was religious, but it passed quite quickly.
But then again, I grew up where religion is closely tied to nationality - almost all of my friends say you can't be a Serb and not be Orthodox Christian. Traditions - pointless, superstitious, paganistic (for real though!) or otherwise - are the main focus of the religion, but there's not a lot of spirituality and morality. The cynic in me sees all these traditions as something that goes far away from the actual religion.
Case in point - on Christmas Eve, people in my village drink on the streets, shoot guns and improvised "devices", ride horses, etc. Every family also has a patron saint who "protects" their home. So every year, you celebrate your patron saint by inviting family and friends to eat until your belt snaps in half and drink until you're under the table. Now what's the point of that, in the context of Christianity? (Fun fact: This exact custom was ordinary even before Serbs accepted Christianity - we only celebrated Slavic gods instead of Christian saints.)
One of the other gripes I have with religion is that you need to have a religious upbringing in order to be religious. It almost can't be otherwise - you can't just "find Jesus" (or whomever else) if someone in your family or surroundings doesn't teach you how to think that way. I see myself, and I don't have any faith, but I wasn't taught to. The same way you learn language when you're young, the same way you are learned religion. The brain just soaks it up, without any place for critical thinking.
And the final gripe I have is the Church. Apart from being very vulnerable to corruption and bad apples, it also, to me, seems completely unnecessary. Why do you need it to pray, to believe? Why do you need to give money to it? Why do the high-ranking individuals get driven in blacked-out Audis when a lot of their "fanbase" is poor and still gives money to them? Plus, there's politics. Popes and Patriarchs are very powerful individuals, politically, because they often have support from the majority of a country's (or world) population. They weren't strangers to war-mongering (and even helping war criminals) across history, even up to recent times. And then there's the everlasting bigotry (women have to enter any church from the other entrance here), which seems to be changing but rather slowly for the times. You manipulate so much people into believing in a doctrine that's very outdated (thousands of years old), instead of using the power to bring unity and love to all. Imagine that!
In my early 20s I started discovering astrophysics, I also love history and have always loved science in general, so the fact that we're just not special at all was just mindblowing to me. The
pale blue dot monologue still resonates very much with me. We're just not special, and I don't, and can't, believe in intelligent design or a God or something that is supernatural. I'm in awe of the laws of nature, physics etc.
But lately I discovered Jordan B. Peterson's thoughts on religion, read some books, became interested in philosophy and tried to think a bit on that matter, and the only thing I can say about God is that I think it exists, but was entirely made up by people. Read this quote below (taken not directly from Dostoevsky, but from one of his characters).
“The object of every national movement, in every people and at every period of its existence is only the seeking for its god, who must be its own god, and the faith in Him as the only true one. God is the synthetic personality of the whole people, taken from its beginning to its end. It has never happened that all, or even many, peoples have had one common god, but each has always had its own. It's a sign of the decay of nations when they begin to have gods in common. When gods begin to be common to several nations the gods are dying and the faith in them, together with the nations themselves. The stronger a people the more individual their God. There never has been a nation without a religion, that is, without an idea of good and evil. Every people has its own conception of good and evil, and its own good and evil. When the same conceptions of good and evil become prevalent in several nations, then these nations are dying, and then the very distinction between good and evil is beginning to disappear.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Demons
That's more or less what I think is true. God is just a collection of morals of people, and at the same time, the perfect being to which we look up and want to mimic. Heaven and Hell are right here, right now, not in the "afterlife".
To suffer terribly and to know yourself as the cause? That is hell.
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life
These thoughts seemed a bit personally groundbreaking, and every time I encounter any religious thought, I am able to analyze it through this context, instead of a purely superstitious one. I can understand religion - at least the Judeo-Christian one (haven't really studied the others), and I can understand why some people would want something like this in their lives. To me this transcends belief, and is not even faith, not even spirituality. It's just how our minds work, given that they were shaped by thousands of years of belief in something which couldn't be seen. That's why we have Orthodox Christian traditions that are paganistic in its origins. That's why we have religion that differs slightly from the one in other countries with Orthodox Christianity. The customs aren't the same.
And lastly, I've been listening to Kendrick Lamar (who, even though he's a loon for saying Jesus put him on Earth for an important task, is still a great rapper with incredible insight). And I understand what he means when he says
he's dying of thirst, or when he answers
How Much a Dollar Cost?, and it's this belief that there's something more and bigger than yourself, more than pain and suffering... To me, this is ok, and sometimes I wish I had a bit of that. But then again, I quickly dispense of the superstitious stuff when I see it. It's still pointless to me.
