"It's All Cool, Man."

“You have a wonderful personality. Develop it. Be yourself. Don’t imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or possessing external things. Your perfection is inside of you. If only you could realise that, you would not want to be rich. Ordinary riches can be stolen from a man. Real riches cannot. In the treasury-house of your soul there are infinitely precious things, that may not be taken from you.” - Oscar Wilde


For today's post I intended to quote a particular video and then talk about it. I then realized that I wanted to quote pretty much the entire video, so I shall just embed it for your convenience.





I love this video so much. It's basically saying "Some people are religious, and other people aren't, but who is and isn't doesn't matter because we're all trying to do the same thing: find or create meaning in our lives. The details of someone's beliefs don't matter so much as how their beliefs affect them."


I was having a discussion a few weeks ago with two of my friends, one of which is religious and the other of which is agnostic. The agnostic friend and I were trying to get the religious one to understand that people of other religions find as much truth in their beliefs as she does in hers. 


She insisted that her proof carried more weight than their proof because their beliefs were wrong and hers were right (and that we didn't get it because we just don't believe). We insisted that there's really no way of knowing (and that if we have to believe in order to see the proof as proof then it's not "proof" at all) so all types of belief are just as valid as all of the other ones. 
Notice that I say "types of belief" rather than "religions." There are plenty of theological details I don't find remotely plausible (which of course does not include Pastafarians, because I most definitely am held to the ground by one of His Great Noodly Tendrils rather than that ridiculous thing called gravity).


But there's the thing with absolute theological truth- there is a right and there is a wrong and it matters. With me, modes of belief are like Skittles. They're all the same thing: they just have different colors and flavors, and some flavors I like better than others, but that doesn't mean other people can't like the ones I don't.


Because I really don't think it matters whether there's a god or many gods or no gods at all. We're all here on the same planet trying to do the same stuff. And since I also believe that if there is a god he/she's not going to condemn me to an eternity of hellfire just for not being completely assured of his/her existence, I'm not worried about what may or may not come next. 
Figuring out life on Earth is plenty for me to handle.