I just can't believe. I don't have any faith. I think when you're dead, you're dead and that's the end. When the synapses stop firing in the brain, it's lights out.
#death
(1) Most atheists haven't tried anything and just jump to conclusions. It's because today it's more convenient and easier to be an atheist. Being an atheist is fashionable today. On the other hand, having faith is very difficult nowadays. You, Antwan, is different.
I think maybe I'm just stupid. I'm slow. It took me a long time. I had to go thru everything. I was trying to make it work. But it didn't work. Religion doesn't work. I don't know how some people believe in it. That always fascinated me. What makes them tick
(1) I confess here that I used to associate with Jehovah's Witnesses at the age of 18. It was only for several months, maybe five. I was on the verge of being baptized. My whole family, together with my relatives, opposed my faith and stopped me.
(2) I realized that if I wanted to pursue my faith, I would have to abandon my whole family. I couldn't have done that. I didn't want my little brother and sister to suffer on account of me after I left the rest of my family. So I gave up on my faith.
(3) Then I went into existentialism. As I grew older, I attempted to get back to my old faith but I couldn't. I gradually realized that when I pursued Christian faith at that time when I was 18, it was not that I truly believed in God or any other part of Christianity.
(4) I pursued Christianity precisely because the Jehovah's Witnesses, at least back in the 1970s, strongly believed that the world would come to an end very, very soon, perhaps several years from then. That news brought me to ecstasy.
(5) I hated the whole world back then, just as later in my life. I didn't even care whether what they predicted would come true or not. I just stuck and clung to the hope, however unconvincing, that this whole world that I loathed would come to an end very soon.
Well, there've been quite a few of those doomsday cults that have come & gone. There was the Heaven's Gate cult out in California. They expedited the end of the world by eating tainted apple sauce & laying down with new sneakers ready to board the mothership