Why I choose non belief

Yeah I'm just C/Ping a forum post I made last night cause I'm lazy and need a new entry to this here blog.

I was raised as a very very soft "backwater" protestant, we soon realized that Sunday school wasn't a wise choice for someone as belligerent, authority testing and overall questioning as myself. So my parents started taking me to the Zoo. When I was around 10 or 12 or something, I realized I blamed God for a lot of things. I decided that it was a scapegoat, something I could be mad at when everything else was unavailable and it was at that point that I realized how juvenile faith was.

I then started on a road of apathy, I just didn't give a shit what anyone was...til I was with an "Atheist Zealot" roommate while dating a pastors daughter. That opened my eyes to a whole dichotomy, a whole world of retards doing interpretive dance for Jesus and loving him SO FUCKING MUCH they couldn't even stand it and were RUNNING AROUND FLAILING all while I was getting a barrage of logic from my old roommate.

If you know anything about me you know it wasn't a choice, really.

I find that people are hardwired to solve puzzles and to anthropomorphize things to rationalize and understand their existence. Let's use sun worshipers, as they are more common than random Jesus/Saturn/WHATEVER discrete gods as per number of upstart societies that randomly started worshiping shit. They see the sun, they know it has a profound effect on the day night cycle and their sleep patterns, their crops and the weather (based on position in the sky). The Aztecs, for example, had NO MEANS OF UNDERSTANDING IT BEYOND THAT. So what do they do? Give it superpowers, then give it emotions- anger, pleasure etc based on murder or gifts or whatever you feel like putting in there, they tried it all. After that, you don't actually have to add ANYTHING to start a religion...however, many of them did.

Once you have an 'answer', do you look for anything more? I doubt it. I rarely do myself. That's how religion works: 1 part being told how things work, 1 part accepting it, 1 part anthropomorphizing and 1 part supernatural...but you need TWO little more things: reverse engineering and coincidence.

So once you have a working model of what your deity/sun/whatever is, you can throw down a bit of reverse engineering:

Person 1: "Our crops are shit this year"

Person 2: 'yeah, it's because we did (or didn't) do X'

Person 1: "HOLY SHIT how can we make up for it?"

Person 2: *throws a dart at a spinning wheel while blindfoled* 'see how I hit that dartboard? It says to rape every single animal and child around us'

Person 1: "Imma get me a Tapir"

**SUN COMES OUT AND THE CROPS ARE AMAZING...OR THEY AREN'T**

Person 1: "well, looks like we did/didn't do the right thing, FUCK, our god is feeling SOMETHING AT US"

In the example, you see a problem that is reverse engineered to fit the mold of the problem at hand, thusly absolving the faithful thought and responsibility. You'll note that no matter what the outcome is, it can be attributed to the deity at hand. So either they did the right thing, pleasing the deity, and positive outcome or they did the wrong thing, displeasing the deity, and negative outcome. Either way, anthropomorphizing galore.

tl;dr:

Religion is:

1. Seeing a problem that needs solving and being profoundly lazy as a species (we all do this)
1. Being told how things work and accepting it (we all fucking do this)
2. Anthropomorphizing (if you have a cat or dog you understand)
3. Supernatural abilities (conveniently inaccessible to study)
4. Reverse Engineering (If a solution occurs, to ANYTHING, work it backwards til it's the deitys credit. In modern times we call it either a "test" or a "miracle")
5. Coincidence (any problem can be dumped on to the deity, positive or negative)

I also find we are limited by observers bias. I struggle to find my own humanity, knowing just how fucked up I really am VS what is normal. In some cases, I've written off shit like hallucinations as "normal" while thinking a certain normal feeling is "bizarre". I think this plays a GIANT role in determining a personal god. It's comforting, it's selfish and it's individual, which is why every single member of every single religion experiences things differently, from feigning speaking in tongues to crashing an airplane into a tower. I demand boundaries and standards in my existence, how can I deal with such a flimsy pile of non definable shit? Well, I can't.