Atheism and You - By Maverick - Personal - http://maxpages.com/chinaman/Atheism_and

Ok so lately I have decided that my new pet peeve is when people question the (untrue) fact that I am an atheist. When in casual conversation, religion or religious practice comes up and it becomes apparent that I do not believe in any kind of greater being. People tend to either, A) not believe me, or B) become shocked and give me what I like to call the “Oh my god he is going to hell" face. So I have decided that today shall be the day in which I formally tackle this issue and hopefully can get the damn Jesus fish off of my back.
First things first, I am not an atheist that believes that organized religion is a bad thing. In many ways I can see how organized religion is a benefit in many people’s lives. Yet for me it does nothing. I have not once ever been greatly inspired by something I heard in church, or in anything that I was taught in CCD. Even at a small age, can I can remember saying why should I believe in this, and whenever I asked the question I was always told that I just had to have faith.
Faith.
To me faith is a very interesting concept. What exactly is faith, and why does faith and fate automatically seem to go hand in hand? I do not see where people find comfort in the fact that everything that happens, happens for a reason. To me that is possibly the most disheartening thing that I have ever heard. Pretty much people were trying to tell me that no matter how hard I work at something, or how little I work, the outcome should, in the end, be the same. I mean seriously here, people. I cannot see the comfort in the fact that god has a plan for all of us because quite frankly me and God never quite saw eye to eye, so I’m pretty sure his plan he had set up for me is not what I had envisioned.
The one concept that I could never understand was that people wanted me to have faith in a deity that allowed so much evil in a world. What I mean by this is that if God is all loving and all knowing, why the hell does he allow for rapes to happen? Can you answer me why he thinks it was wise for children to be born addicted to crack? Sure he allowed for human beings to have this concept of choice, but why, if this god is as good as everyone says, why would, or COULD he stand for such things to happen?
There are people out there who say that if faith was easy than everyone would believe. Yet it is by far much easier for a person to believe in a god than for a person to not believe. A person that believes has by far the greatest cop out of all time. That is the idea that if something happens, then some mystical being had decided for it to happen. This is the idea that has plagued me the most. Do some people just believe for the sake of believing? Do they believe in the idea of a god, just for the fact that they are afraid to face the fact that there are things in life that happen for no reason, that sometimes life is just crueler to some of us than others. Life without meaning is a very scary thing, and I think there are those people out there whose only reason to believe in a god is that it gives them a reason to go on and to live life.
To me religion has become much more of a thing of something for people to cling to rather than to actually believe in. The problem with this is that I think that people have lost sight of what religion is all about, religion isn’t about finding a reason why things happen to you, it's supposed to be about finding a reason why were here, not as individuals but as a people.

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Page Updated Thu Jan 17, 2008 12:43am EST