"When I got rid of God-belief, a new thing happened. I realized I wasn’t simply making a factual claim. Asking whether God existed wasn’t like asking if there was a box of crackers in the pantry. I found out quickly that when I said, “There’s no God.” I was making a claim about all of reality. When I believed in God, the world around me had purpose. It had been carefully orchestrated and it moved forward toward a goal. Stepping away from God meant an end to all that. In leaving God aside, a new vision of the world emerged. Everything around me and within me became mechanical, unthinking, and chaotic."
"Evolution too can be quite beautiful—in the words of one recent book it’s “the greatest show on earth”—but I found my own formation deeply troubling. The excessive greed and gluttony, violence and lust etched into my DNA often made me miserable. It wouldn’t be so bad if fear and overeating, promiscuity and aggression were healthy; but these were not signs of a good life. They were obstacles. They consistently made my life miserable. On the face of it, I found I wasn’t a mere animal. I recognized that I was an animal preprogrammed to think and act in self-destructive ways, ways that didn’t care about “me”—only about the promotion and replication of my genes."
"I may accomplish all I wish. I may pursue and achieve “the good life”, but the end has been scripted and it’s not gracious. I will read my books, I will take my pictures, and then the world which handed me my out-of-control body will take it back again—and it will do it without thought or remorse.
Again, I’m not a depressed person, and I bet you’re not either, but I recognized that I was deceiving myself if I didn’t own the real and pressing problem of death. Everything around me was dying. My wife would die. My sons would die. Everyone in my family would die. Everyone in my city and my culture would die. Everyone on this planet would die, and the human race fairs no better. The earth will die when the sun grows to an enormous size and engulfs our world. Our solar system will die when the sun exhausts its remaining energy. The entire natural order will eventually die as our universe turns all its remaining gas into stars and those star inevitably burn out. Entropy holds the reigns, and in the distant future all that will remain of our once beautiful cosmos will be a dark, thinning gas."
"I realized that death was a thief, and it was robbing me now of all the significance, all the meaning I could hope to find. Everything I might want to build was already debris, for when I asked the question, “What should I do with my life? What should I care about?” The answer that came screaming back at me was, “It doesn’t matter. It will all disappear.”"
"I consistently hit this spot where I recognized that the only hope for myself, my wife, my sons, my friends, my culture to transcend death and bondage to the chemicals within us was help from something separate from the blind, degenerating natural order. There was nothing any of us could do to create a lasting life or freedom.
We need a soul"
"Of course, you don’t need to actually believe in God to make this step. Many of the wisest and most careful thinkers I know reject belief in God. They hold that life is absurd, but many of them continue to look with hope—and this seems to me the most rational place to be. Come down where you will, I find it ridiculous to pretend like God’s existence makes no difference at all. Everything in my experiences scream out that we should devote our best energies and thinking to looking for a God."
"Eventually I put it all together and I concluded, if love is real, if freedom is real, if lasting significance is possible—God must be real. Only a God-like being could care about me and those I love. Only a God could choose to infuse us all with a life that is more than chemicals spinning as they will. Only a personality can see our natural plight, can understand that everything we build, every love we have is crumbling before us. Only a being with considerable strength can mercifully change our natural course. Only a God could transform the hellish condition in which I initially found myself. Death and genetics are immensely powerful, and it would take something with enormous muscle and compassion to push back the course of nature so everyone I cared for might really live."
"I lost nothing by seeking a God who cared for me, but I would lose everything I cared for if that God was not there."
- Debris
Extremely touching essay about the search for God - Look it up and read it. - and these are only a few excerpts! :)
The World Spins Madly On by The Weepies
Woke up and wished that I was dead
With an aching in my head
I lay motionless in bed
I thought of you and where you'd gone
and let the world spin madly on
Everything that I said I'd do
Like make the world brand new
And take the time for you
I just got lost and slept right through the dawn
And the world spins madly on
I let the day go by
I always say goodbye
I watch the stars from my window sill
The whole world is moving and I'm standing still
Woke up and wished that I was dead
With an aching in my head
I lay motionless in bed
The night is here and the day is gone
And the world spins madly on
I thought of you and where you'd gone
And the world spins madly on.
