What made you guys atheists/nonbelievers? (Just curious to know.)
For me it happened at a time when I was told that animals don't have souls like people do, that god views homosexuality as an abomination and realizing that the Bible was written by man. I was a teenager at the time and God in the Old Testament seemed anything but good, in fact he seemed rather cruel. How could I as a gay man respect or even worship a god who sees homosexuality as an abomination? It was like a cruel cosmic joke that blessed the vast majority of straight people not for anything they did to deserve such a blessing other than they were born heterosexual, and yet I and others like me were cursed for being different.
At first I decided that maybe there was a god for gay people and animals, a god that saw the beauty in this world and not some imaginary next one. I still feel that this is a perfect world even with death and suffering.
Though today I side with atheists and agnostics, I deeply feel that there is something beyond the knowable. For a while I felt as if we were just biological machines that simply turned off at the time of death and there was no soul, but now after a series of recent dreams, I believe in reincarnation and groups of souls that incarnate together. If there is a god, we are all just divisions.
I used to wonder, where is the soul in those who suffer brain damage as in alzheimer's disease, or mental retardation, has it left the body? As a biology student observing microbes under a microscope I noticed that living things made choices, no matter how small and were able to alter the course of motion using energy unlike, inorganic, non-living things. Perhaps this was the basis for the soul, the om chant, the point of meditation where you attempt to rid your mind of thought and be in the moment. Perhaps the soul is that silent observer that makes a choice.
When I think of time, it feels like a wave, the seconds ticking away, each moment different from the next. Moving from the past into a future place in space riding the crest of some wave. Einstein claims that time is relative to the observer and that time slows down for those who move faster though space. It would imply that the past, present and future exists somewhere, hidden from view.
That made me wonder how could my mass both exist in the past and in the present moment. Doesn't one's mass travel through space. I read that mass acts like both a particle and a wave, and on the surface that seems to be a bit of a paradox. Light itself seems like a paradox, because a wave implies being propagated through some sort of medium, but space appears to be mostly devoid of mass.
Then Einstein claims that our universe is made of some fabric called space-time and that massive objects curve space-time towards the center of mass. Ancient thinkers used to believe in the aether, that elementary particle that fills all of space and that which light moves through. What if it actually exists and that matter moves through it as well. Perhaps matter is actually a standing wave and moves as a wave thought the aether much like a wave moves through the ocean. If a person were nothing but a wave, it would be impossible to study the nature of the aether because they do not travel along with us through space. We come into existence only in the now moment as we pass through a different area of the aether, our past lies somewhere off in space behind us as our solar system and galaxy zips along on its cosmic journey and our future selves lies in the direction we are heading.
That brings me back to the concept of block time, where all of time exists somewhere even all of the possible future events. What do we have that is even similar to this concept? Video games. In many ways a past, present and future are programed and as you play the game you interact with other players and every game is different each time you play it by the combined choices that each character makes. Is there good or evil in video games? Is there a god or just those who created the game? Can the future be known? Can those who design the game know which choices you will make each time you play the game. He can program all the possible outcomes, but can the creators predict which one's you will choose.
I like to think that this is closer to the true reality of our universe. There exists this universe where the past, present and multiple possible futures all exist in this thing called space-time and that we are characters in a game played by souls in which there is no true good or evil only the perceptions of the characters we play. And god if it exists perhaps created the game with a beginning middle and infinite endings.
What if this universe along with the creators of this game are but the creations of some bigger game that goes on and on.