A Realization and Meditation

After a deep chat deep into the night with a good friend, a realization dawned on me. At this point in my life, my religious affiliation has teetered between my traditional Baptist upbringing and my scientific and philosophical reasoning. On one side is the traditional American religion, which surrounded me my entire life. I have since rejected that concept of God. The Bible, Christianity, Christians, and the message of the purported son of God do not rationalize and are not compatible with each other. My life has been directed and steered down a path of rationalism and the love of truth, none of which can be found among the pages of the Bible or in the words of Christians.

My religious views have since fallen into a system of doubt and disbelief, shunning the traditional conceptualization of a god. If anyone were to ask me today what my religious beliefs are, I should say to the mass populous I am an atheist, as I do not believe in any humanly conceived notion of a god, but to the educated and reasoning people of the world, I should say I am an agnostic. I will not rule out, in the end, the existence of a god. As of right now, no "proof" offered to me for the existence of a god figure has been a sufficient amount of empirical evidence to say conclusively "God exists." Adding to that, however, from a purely philosophical argument, I should also say that I see insufficient evidence to claim "God does not exist."

If one is to claim that the God of Christianity exists, with what evidence can one cast down the gods of the other religions of the world? If one has evidence to refute Allah, Shiva, or any other god, why should that evidence not be turned on the god of the questioners religion? When people speak of the classical gods, they now laugh at the pantheon of incestual, bickering gods of Homer. Zeus cannot possibly exist in the mind of the common Christian today. Christians are atheists in respect to the Homeric, classical gods. But if Zeus cannot possibly exist, and is therefore an invalid theory, why is the Christian concept of God any more valid? Following this mode of thought is how I come to say that I am an atheist in relation to the god of Christianity.