So with everybody being religious and getting baptised and whatever, i've had all this fun stuff to research and read up on. First up, i've been reading "Under the Banner of Heaven" by Jon Krakauer. The main focus of the story is about fundamentalists mormons who do bad things, but there are a lot of general summaries of how the legitimate mormon church works and runs and was started. i'm all for religion when it helps you live a better life: gets you off the drugs and off the streets and helps you on your feet. that's awesome. so in that sense, i have nothing against any religion. but when you get down to how it all began with joseph and the golden plates and polygamy and whatever, it's kinda nutty.
then again, i'm sure other religions would get this kind of scrutiny if they were recent enough. other religions simply have the benefit of their origins being before printing presses and newspapers and people actually accurately documenting what the hell was going on.
so all religions are kooky, right? i'm thinking so. here's something i read that made me feel a lot better about what i believe:
it's called An Atheist Manifesto. It's really well written and will make you think (if you're someone who likes to think) or will maybe make you mad (if you're someone who believes and doesn't like to think).
Here's a great paragraph discussing people's rational explanations for their beliefs:
It is perfectly absurd for religious moderates to suggest that a rational human being can believe in God simply because this belief makes him happy, relieves his fear of death or gives his life meaning. The absurdity becomes obvious the moment we swap the notion of God for some other consoling proposition: Imagine, for instance, that a man wants to believe that there is a diamond buried somewhere in his yard that is the size of a refrigerator. No doubt it would feel uncommonly good to believe this. Just imagine what would happen if he then followed the example of religious moderates and maintained this belief along pragmatic lines: When asked why he thinks that there is a diamond in his yard that is thousands of times larger than any yet discovered, he says things like, "This belief gives my life meaning," or "My family and I enjoy digging for it on Sundays," or "I wouldn't want to live in a universe where there wasn't a diamond buried in my backyard that is the size of a refrigerator." Clearly these responses are inadequate. But they are worse than that. They are the responses of a madman or an idiot.