My Religious Belief

As a child I did go to Sunday school and was baptised. My parents weren't overtly religious; just enough to follow the moral standards that are contained by it. But as a roman catholic family they did ask for me to at least go to Sunday school and get my first communion done. If I wanted afterwards they said I could continue in going to Sunday school and going through all the other steps or just ditch the whole religion all together. After I got the communion I liked having my weekends to enjoy life a bit more than just during dusk so I didn't go back to church since then. So I consider myself pretty lucky to have such non-overbearing parents when it came to my beliefs; so long as I didn't do anything bad like steal or mortally wound someone they where fine.

Becuase of not having any form of belief system being told to me, during my teenage years while living in Fort Lauderdale I phased through the broad non-religious type labels. Being as I wasn't too fond of religious tendencies to oppress and being a teenager and hence all about rebellion and freedom (more the rebellion I would assume since freedom is something that always sticks around once you get it) my first direction was Atheism. It was the most popular one therefore the first one I found so I was happily obliged to label myself as such. Eventually I became rather bored of "atheism", I never really followed it to begin with as I always upheld my own personal beliefs that got some of it's first roots out of things like the butterfly effect and different semantic of the idea of "fate" and "destiny". So I found atheism pretty boring, summing it up with the analogy of how a person of different ideology behaves on their death bed; with the atheistic person just noting his dropping heart rate and blood pressure and slowing metabolic rate.

Of course me still being young, my beliefs where still pretty rough around the edges so I moved to agnosticism when I heard about it. In retrospect I don't know why I thought an ideology that could be summed up with "I dunno" would be any less boring than atheism but then again, after a caffeine withdraw that left my haunted I replaced coke cans with vodka coolers so I've made queerer leaps in logic. Again however my own personal beliefs stayed the same, and actually started becoming more shaped and comprehensible; till the point I realized that Agnosticism was too bland to encompass what I believed in. Going back to the analogy, the agnostic person would just lay in bed just pondering "maybe I'm just dying or maybe I'm gonna go somewhere, maybe..."

After ditching agnosticism I was left with just being theistic. The broadest of labels meaning that I carried my own personal belief. It stopped there as I didn't really know any other schools of thought when it came to beliefs and I wasn't all that interested in theology to find out; funny the adventures ignorance takes you. Recently though, reading the pages in preparation for the class on the philosophy of religions, I ran into a broad belief label that almost hit the nail on summarizing all of my beliefs. It was pantheism; the belief that everything, mainly nature/universe for me, was "god"; but not god in a traditional omni-thing sense but just that nature is an immanent abstract god as Wikipedia puts it.

It most closely adheres to my belief since it goes well with my construction of the butterfly effect; which is what my semantics of fate and destiny stem from. I view both ideas as more of a tier in which destiny is the idea of an unchangeable end point; such as death; where as with enough free-will, you could change or shift your fate. The reason this came from the butterfly effect is because all life on this planet arose from one or a handful of points and that becuase of that, everything has always had intricate interactions to each other and always will. As one part of my belief system, that's the reasoning of where fate stems from because it's a relatively local and young line of fate that started.. The starting point of the entire universe and it's fundamental laws however is what I consider creates destiny because no amount of free-will could ever change the ebb and flow that came from the insurmountable years of interactions since the universe was created.

Of course I still don't believe my own personal belief under pantheism is done or smoothed out. Infact, what I just described is just one thing from a sea of ideas that surf around my head. There's still looks of nicks and lumps that need to be smoothed out and polished; and even things I haven't even taken time to consider. So my belief system is always changing; But considering my major isn't theology I probably never will perfect my belief. Though that doesn't bother me much because even in my current iteration of belief, another part of it is you should live each day as if you won't awake the next. Meaning always strive to do what you want as to not have to relay on the next day to fix or blanket over an error. Go to sleep happy so you may awake even happier for having another day to do something else.

Note: Didn't have time to proof-read (at work) so sorry if it's hard to read with all the fragmented sentences I usually produce in a first type. If you spot anything that needs to be clearer feel free to comment. (Who am I writing this to?)