Life on a Boat

I let go of religion a long time ago. In my younger years I felt like I gave "a good go" at it. I tried hard to learn the rules, opened my heart to a couple of gods and tried to immerse myself in a couple of cultures. But it just never took. I found I like to question too much. And religion always seemed to me merely a way for people to have hope for things to get better and then have something to blame when these things didn't get better. I saw it as a total lack of personal responsibility for one's actions.

It was when I first read The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice that I seriously considered what could be an awful truth: that there is no god. We are all alone and when you die, that's it. There is no more. And to a person whose memories, whose connections to others, are everything to him, well..it became my one true fear.

I decided rather to focus on what I DO know exists: life and all its wonders. I looked at the world with fresh eyes and believed myself awake...heightened somehow. I kissed flowers, became a thrill-seeker. I tried harder to notice and appreciate my friends' laughs more.

One time, I was smoking pot at a friend's house in San Francisco (I wonder how many times that sentence has been uttered by someone) and I had another awful revelation: that none of us are real. That god is the only being. Driven mad by the overwhelming loneliness, he separated himself into several personalities in his image. And these personalities are manifested in our races, in our cultures. We like to claim that we are all unique individuals. But if you look at people closely enough, we all seem to be molds of a particular archetype. So we don't really exist as we think we do. We are all part of the cold, lost and lonely light that is god. Completely morbid, I know, but I have been unable to shake this idea from my consciousness.

Frightend into hiding, my heart has lain quiet on this for many years. I have never been able to even understand the concept of faith. I mean, how do you blindly believe in something that you can never really be certain is there?

I recently read The Life of Pi by Yann Martel. In it, he writes something that truly spoke to me because he challenged what I thought was my unshakeable zest for life.

He writes: "I'll be honest about it. It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for a while...But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation."

I think maybe it's time to get back on the boat.