By Edgar Louis de Gracia
HAPI Scholar
When I was a young boy, I was subjected to religious indoctrination. For the longest time, I was led to believe that asking for forgiveness, being good, and praying to God would help; my young self believed those words and never questioned them.
As time passed, when I was around eight or nine, I was bullied, used, and betrayed by friends whom I thought would never do such things. So I prayed to God that they might change and for him to help me get out of the mess that my “friends” had created. Long story short, praying never worked. On that fateful day of my birthday, I turned into a skeptic and never looked back on that decision ever since.
Though I am skeptical of religion and the existence of the divine, I still practice the Christian tradition purely out of respect for Christianity and my family. I did let my family know of my beliefs; though they were against the idea of me being a skeptic, they still respected my views.
When times get tough, we always try to help each other rather than pray to divine beings because we believe that human virtues and dignity are far more important than religious beliefs.
I first met someone who truly resonated with me when I was still in Junior High School. He indeed was a great friend: we had the same skepticism and pondered on the idea of God existing. We debated on many topics such as politics, history, and moral values.
After finishing Junior High, we parted ways. Now I debate with Bible thumpers on the Internet and discuss politics on either Reddit or on the comment section of YouTube.
When I graduated from Junior High School, I put science, logic, and reason first over human emotion. To add to that, I have also put more emphasis on human virtues simply because it is more logical than putting all of your faith in an imaginary friend in the sky.
Throughout my time in Senior High School, I have met like-minded individuals and truly resonated with them. As a result, when times get tough, we always try to help each other rather than pray to divine beings because we believe that human virtues and dignity are far more important than religious beliefs.
Religion is usually filled with hypocrisy for some odd reason. Take the believers of the Christian faith, for example; people who have a higher rank in the Church are usually people who don’t believe in (or at the very least, abuse) the Christian faith. Instead, they use the Christian faith to steal money and abuse the people who blindly follow them.
Continuing on the hypocrisy track, Christianity (particularly Catholicism) has also been known to kill scores of innocent civilians for the sake of converting their cultures into Christianity. These include crimes against humanity such as the Inquisition, the Salem Witch Trials, et cetera. Yet despite this, Christians continue to parade how great their religion is and metaphorically crucify any who dare question the institution.
These are a few of the reasons why I have become a skeptic over the existence of the divine and the ideas of religion. I really did try to become a religious person, but failed because I cannot support a religion whose believers would go out of their way to kill people in order to prove how great their God is.
“I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.” – Richard Dawkins
