Originally Posted By: big fat pig
tbh, i used to call myself Christian and i read the scriptures every day looking for answers, it seemed to present more questions to me than answers, slowly realizing this i eventually just stopped... i started looking at the philosophies of other religions and came to the conclusion that faith systems were simply there to give people hope/security when reality got too rough... now i call myself a nihilist, there is no ultimate truth except that all is vanity, ultimately, on a cosmic scale, everything is meaningless and purposeless. you might say 'why live then?' i am at peace with the fact that i am merely human and that i probably won't leave a huge impact on society or on this universe; i don't desire higher power or special honors, i want my life to be meaningful to the ones i care about and leave this place knowing that i've made some kind of contribution to our species.


I have been a Christian all my life but growing up I rarely went to Church and I only went a few times while serving in the Army and afterwards. While in College I read a few books which were left out of the Bible or were altered before putting them in the Bible and from that I stopped looking to outside sources other than direct prayer to God for philosophical answers.

I cannot remember all of the books I read for my Civilization Class but two writings that are sticking with me are,

In Genesis God made all of the animal forms and then showed Adam all of them and asked him to choose his form, when Adam looked to God and said that he wanted God’s form. As a child the Genesis story I read said that God made man in his image, but that is not entirely true. The lesson I got from this was that all of us can be what ever we want to be.

The second piece I read which hung heavy on my consciousness was a line from Jesus stating that we do not need the Church to go to Heaven and all we really need is the Spirit of Christ in our hearts. To me, that means anyone can get to Heaven, even a bush man from deepest Africa who may not have even heard of Jesus Christ as long as the spirit of Christ is in his heart. It also means to me that Church is not all that important to me, but I do understand that it may be important to others and therefore it is important.