I am a man of faith

From my experience atheists are categorized as empty embittered vessals of cold unfeeling reason by most spiritual people who tend to throw phrases like ‘your not looking with your heart’ and ‘I pray for your soul’ which I find more upsetting than they could possibly find me having no ‘faith.’ But I am a man of faith, I have complete faith in humanity rather than divinity, that’s all. I don’t believe human behaviour is random, people behave the way they do and I believe they do so with very little devine intervention. Nietzsche decribed atheism as an evolution of Christianity moving from the will to power to the will to truth (as an extension of the will to power). Comments like ‘The Devil was at work in Hitler’s heart ‘are dangerous by virtue of the fact that theres a lot of precedent that a lot of rulers both godly and not have commited genocide and invaded etc.
Furthermore I have faith that peoples brains tick away trying to make sense of their surroundings, natural selection means loser strategies tend to get abandoned or the natural consequences mean people learn behaviours. I have faith because I can’t learn lessons for other people. I was at an industry show talking to a guy at the stall I worked at who was telling me how he almost lost the use of his legs when he came off a motorcycle at 120km/h and said ‘Nobody could have told me’ and I remarked that he’d probably been told several times and he remarked ‘oh well live and learn’ and its hard you know to not make the same mistakes that have been made before because you feel so in control.
But I have faith that some people are just going to luck out and others learn from their mistakes. A conscious mind can do anything. What happens in 1000 years time when technological advances mean that creating a universe just isn’t that impressive. I mean it already isn’t a singularity exploding and then energy condensing into various configurations of mass. Atheism doesn’t have any answers even though it represents as major motivation a will to truth. What makes it hard and a matter of faith is that all those big unknowns the ‘why are we here?’ and ‘what happens next?’ don’t have any answers that you don’t have to define for yourself. It’s comforting to put in a divine system of any kind to fill those blanks, one that can never be refuted through reason as it pins everything on some omnipotent entity understanding why everything is the way it is and having faith that it’s all for the best. In that sense I totally agree if it means that the Universe is in the control of an omnipresent entity and there’s nothing you can do about it, therefore not worth worrying about it, that’s fine by me. I mean if a god of any kind dropped out of the sky tomorrow and said ‘Tom I’m your god’ I’d have the same reaction as if my father did that ‘Where the f$%k have you been all my life?’ I’ve learnt to be independent I don’t need god or faith and furthermore my spirituality is such a personal thing I’d never cede authority to someone who I’ve been told is better at interpreting the religion than I am (or you for that matter).
So that’s what I believe in the mundane world that I can detect with my four senses, its difficult and complex and spiritually rewarding. It compels me to get the most out of every day when your life is a brief respite between two infinite voids. I believe that an ordinary human being possesses infinite potential , that we are capable of anything. JFK hit the nail on the head really when he said (something that was probably written by someone else) ‘Everything that man has ever achieved was at one point in time thought impossible’ which equates to ‘if you can dream it you can do it’
I have nothing against religion, I’m personally just not motivated by promises of the divine, getting up and sitting through sermons, engaging in routine ritual. More to the point I probably couldn’t even be sold a religion.
I’ve met people of various different faiths in my time, I’ve met Catholics that are cool and have their shit together and I’ve met Catholics that are nutcases who lead miserable lives. I’ve met muslims who are cool and keep their shit together and I’ve met muslims who freak me out and are depressing. I’ve met buddhusts that are cool calm and collected and I’ve met Buddhists that are insane and dogmatic. Hindus generally seem to be nice. The universal truths though don’t seem to be so universal and I’ve concluded that whatever it is that works it’s probably not the religion but the attitude of the practitioner that makes the difference. This is no reason to discard religion on a whole it just says to me that there’s no correlation between any one religion and quality of peoples lives. I get just as much inspiration watching the Transformers Movie as I have out of Chapel services. Have a set of values stick to them and get out of anything what you can (especially money just for the fun of it).