hildeguardog's Diaryland Diary

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My Religion

There is no time. Leap-years, daylight savings? The way the sun sets at different times every day? -all examples of a convenience that is necessary for a society like our own. But is such a convenience worth the sacrifice?
Picture this: no time; no clocks, no stop-watches, no urgency. Life would be more enjoyable without this system that tells people whether or not they're on-time.
The way things are, people are led to believe that there is something wrong with sleeping in on school days, that it's preposterous to finish high school in more than four years, or that it is plain dumb to be unsure of where your life will go by the time you're 40.
All this has a beginning, though. I began roughly nine months before March 11th of 1988. The Gatorade that I am drinking began its' demise nearly two and a half hours ago...
And the world will end in 2016, according to the [Aztecs?].
But the Big Bang theory-- when did that happen? More so, was there nothing there before? I mean a big bang doesn't come out of nowhere, right? But I'm looking at nothing as something, do you follow me? Like this.. "nothing" would be described as having...
-a lack of matter
-a lack of color
-a lack of light
-a lack of volume or weight
-infinite space
I could be wrong, but I'm trying to understand what was there before everything. For the Big Bang theory to be possible, there must have been some sort of reaction.. but where did those reactants come from? It's like a black hole came and vacuumed everything away, then vanished.
Being human and having a mind like everybody else, I am bound to the idea that everything has a beginning. Time, as I said before, is used to measure something from its' beginning to its' end. The basis for Chicago was created inside what would become the United States, which was created in North America, which is just one of seven continents on Earth, which was created inside this nine planet-holding solar system, which is a part of the Milky Way Galaxy, and said galaxy is a, I'm assuming, very small portion of the universe... but why stop there? There's always going to be something bigger just like there's always going to be something smaller, right? Ants are tiny, eh? But I'm sure they have their own ants to stop all over... So how small does the Earth get? Grains of sand are pretty small, but there has to be something smaller, I think.
So say the universe is just a tiny smidgen of something much bigger, which is just a small fraction of whatever embodies it... well when does this cycle end?
It ends with God, I think. God is anything and everything, if I'm not mistaken.. so 2,000 or so odd years ago He sent his final prophet to Earth: his son-- being Jesus Christ. But say God is, and created, everything.. well then He looks over everything inside of his enormous world that He built for Himself, right? So 2,000 years isn't that long of a time. I mean if God has to speak through people all over this one universe-- not to mention all the others-- then it's understandable that we won't be hearing from Him in quite some time.
But how long will He wait?
If the end of the our world is coming in 11 years then He'll have to act fast..
But then there are so many other things to take into consideration. There are so many other religions and philosophies that all seem to make atleast a little bit of sense.
Atheism is a religion because "followers" believe that there is no God. Christianity is a religion because they believe that there is a God. Existentialism says that each individual is unique, but in more of a hostile way-- that a person can choose their own actions and, thus, suffer their own consequences.. and basically that human existence is unexplainable... Descartes("I think, therefore I am") has got the most unprovable statement, but what I think he means is that anything outside of your own mind may or may not exist... see what I mean? Religion is like a period, where as philosophy is like a question mark.
But weighing philosophy too much would lead to the denial of God, which would ultimately send you to hell in a handbasket if the world was so inclined...
So as I've interpreted things, and as I just said, denying God is the only way to go to Hell. I guess that means that "conscientious objectors" are the only bad people since it's assumed that everyone will sin, get what I'm trying to say? But if God created us in his image then why are there temptations and evil in the world. Why couldn't Adam and Eve eat an apple? And did God create his angels as well? And if so, why did Lucipher drift from the flock? I get it-- he wanted power.. but why could he think so freely and why were his thoughts [considered to be] evil?
King [James? or David?], if I'm not mistaken, was, other than Jesus, the greatest king of Israel-- but guess what? This prophet knowingly sinned. He impregnated the wife of a general, then tried to force the husband to have sex with her to play it off as being the husband's son.. but, since the general didn't feel it was right to do that while his soldiers were out doing their jobs, he was executed. The king then took the wife in as a wife of his own... and it's a terrible thing to deny a man like this? (I'm pretty sure that story was explaining the cycle of apostasy)
But it's not even that I'm denying God, or His existence.. it's that I'm unsure of who to trust. Do I trust the disheveled lady in the tunnel between Washington subway stops on the train? Is it okay to trust a Sunday school teacher I once had who took the job in order to pay off her rent each month? I just don't find it very realistic that a man can become "ordained" after a few years of training at a monastery. I don't think justice is served by raising kids on one sole religion.
Another thing that I don't entirely understand is religion in places like Mexico, or how it is viewed by many Koreans here in the United States: basically, it seems that the people who, at one time, had a religion thrust upon them are the people that take it more than serious than anybody else. I've met several Koreans that are bigger Christians than I could have ever imagined.. Mexico City, especially, is filled to the brim with diehard Catholics.. Mexico was, for lack of a better word, "forced" into Catholicism by the Spanish missionaries, as were Koreans by other missionaries... Italy being the only exception that comes to my mind, but they're got the Vatican and all the excitement that comes with housing such a powerful religion. The only understanding I can find has to do with nothing more than power. Spain was(and still is, of course) part of Europe, which is and was connected to Asia and, thus, they had more trade capabilities. Gun-powder was discovered in Asia, but they didn't think to put and a handle and a trigger together.. they just had the small cannons and whatnot. So Spain had guns, power, and a much broader view of the world. Also, they brought different medicines(and diseases as well.. but that might disprove the point I'm trying to get at) to Mexico, and built ridiculously big things for them.. So I guess it could have been a combination of several things that got all those people excited about Catholicism.

What scares me the most is eternity. Sure, if there is a God then he's testing our strength and tendencies against temptation, right? But why does any of this matter? Why isn't Earth flawless? Why can't everyone make it into Heaven? And why would he let the loners get into the hands of a power like Satan? Why is it so necessary for people to earn an eternity of happiness in such a short time on Earth?
Right now, for me, there are too many gray areas. I can do nothing more than classify myself as agnostic, which I see as a kind of middle-ground between religion and philosophy. I have not put enough thought into any of this to come out with answers that are good enough for me to appreciate.

2:27 a.m. - Sunday, May. 29, 2005

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