Faith: Why We Believe and Why We Don’t

Why does one person feel the urge to close their hands, look up, and hope to some eternal being when their sports team is about to win or lose. I have never believed in the concept of God. The reality that there is someone up there pulling the strings doesn’t seem very real to me. Having a mother who is very religious and feels the spirituality that preachers so claim, has always made me wonder why one feels the need to believe that they are pawns of someone else’s game?

Believing in God is comforting as this makes you feel as if you are never lonely, this makes you feel as if there is someone always on your side who is willing to help you get your way. But if everybody believed in God and if he was on everybody’s side then who wins?

Believing in God helps a person believe in his more optimistic dreams. Most religions preach that worshipping God will help you attain your materialistic goals. A person who believes in God will always feel more optimistic going into their SATs because they feel like there is a person next to them to help them to go through the whole process.

There is nothing wrong in believing in God, being an atheist doesn’t make one smarter than the other neither does it make one more foolish than the other. Faith and religion help build a person. A person who truly believes in God and follows a specific religion will owe a part of his personality to this religion and the practices of this religion. Faith and belief in a certain religion do not come from force. When we force someone to believe in God we are not forcing them to believe in God, we are forcing them to believe in our perspective of God. Every single person has a different perspective of God, which is discovered through personal experiences, encounters, and events. God earns the faith and trust of his followers.

Human nature is to understand everything around them and to figure out the reason for everything. Fear is instilled inside someone when they cannot explain and understand why something is going. As no plausible explanation could be made the only way to justify such phenomena was to categorize them under something or someone supernatural. So, lighting strikes in the early ages were considered anger spurts of God, at such times people even sacrificed animals and even humans.

Looking at faith and religion from the atheist side of the spectrum, one theory proposes that as humans progressed from tiny hunter-gatherer tribes to huge agrarian communities, our forefathers sought to foster cooperation and tolerance among strangers. Religion, along with belief in a moralizing God, was a societal response to these issues at the time. According to this theory, this was the easy way out. Discipline was hard to maintain, so blaming natural actions such as storms, and floods as a cause of ill discipline, which was all controlled by an all-powerful being was the easy thing to do.

The prime principle of what a God is faulty. In all religions, God is considered as a person with the highest moral values and highest power. One of the neutral theories is followed by world-renowned physicist, Neil De Grasse Tyson. The theory states that in most religions, God is said to be the Almighty one and the one with the highest morality. But, when you look at the world right now, you do not see justice. Several innocent people are dying, while several guilty people are having the time of their life. Death among the innocent and prosperity among the guilty do not seem too moral. Taking into account this logical fallacy, the theory states that God is either not all-powerful, to stop bad things happening to innocent people, or he does not have the highest morality.

“Faith is a luxury I can’t afford” – John Marston

Many atheists look at other people’s faith as negative, they feel the need to disprove their sincere belief. Is it just a matter of the jealous miserabilist cranky crabs in the bucket blocking those who want to get out and tugging them back in? Is it possible, to be more kind to those who have lost hope, that there is a tug of war going on between oblivion and life, and the folks on the “life” end believe they need everyone to risk a little rope burn rather than prancing around singing Kumbaya?

Religion and faith have both brought people together and divided the world. Many of the current affairs within and outside our country are heavily dictated by religion. Discrimination is one of the biggest problems of religion. Even though discrimination is not prescribed in any religion the sole difference has brought out the ugly side of humans. We need to accept and celebrate our differences rather than fighting them. We need to be able to exist peacefully as humans, not divided into different groups.