The theological argument.

Just been inspired by a brief discussion with a friend of mine about religious beliefs and what not. Now I'm sure most of you either know or have deduced that I have renounced my faith and have been going through a journey or spiritual and ethical self-discovery for the last 6 or so years.

Why am I not still a Catholic? I was brought up, like the vast majority of people on this island as a Roman Catholic. I practised the faith and I believed in it until I was about 15 years of age when I realised that I was actually practising it out of habit rather than pious belief. This is the problem that about 80% of Catholics in Malta still have to recognise, the fact that they actually don't practise their faith, they merely exist within the framework of it without paying attention to what they're actually doing. This annoyed me at that age, and it annoys me no less now.

I believe that religion, from it's very conception, has been created by man to aid in his search for a purpose. If anything, it gives man hope. I am in no way going to disrespect a person for genuinely having faith, if anything, well done for being able to commit to it because I couldn't. As far as I'm concerned, live and let live. As long as you don't cram the fact that I'm going to hell (or whatever cosmic punishment your religion speaks of), then I won't go flailing around calling your beliefs 'horse shit'. I promise.

I am unable to invest myself in any particular faith because, as far as I'm concerned, the big religions have been distorted by generation of the other of blatant human influence. I believe that humans are fundamentally flawed and I'd rather live my life with the burden of my own flaws than claiming that theories changed by years and years of other people's flaws are true.

In essence, any ideal has the potential to be beautiful. I think that Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, even Communism, are essentially beautiful ideas. It the way that they've been presented by humans and their images and notions distorted by years of translation and editing that has basically fucked up the lot of them.

I want to agree with Nietzsche and say that "God is dead: of his pity for man hath God died", but I don't think the idea of God is actually dead. It can never be dead as long as man looks for a purpose in life and as long as a higher power can be described as the cause for all we have. Unfortunately, I tend to believe that if there was a higher power, than describing it in human terms is derogatory because it will be beyond our mortal comprehension in any case.

In a nutshell, I do not believe in any organised religion because even if they had an original divine creation, they are now merely human interpretations of the original ideal. Sort of like Plato's thoughts on art being a weak copy of a feeble copy of the ideal. That, in Platonic terms, is religion to me. I will keep living by my own moral compass created by years of thinking, reading and living within a civilised (barely) society and if, after I die, I find out there is a higher power and how I've lived is not good enough for it, then so be it.

Good afternoon, the interwebz.