I do not believe there is a God.
I was raised Catholic and believed all the stories I was told by the nuns. I did not begin to doubt the existence of a higher power until I was in my late twenties. In 1982, a friend of mine was murdered by a serial killer, who this day, has not been arrested. Lynn had just given birth to her fourth child when an unknown person poisoned several bottles of Tylenol throughout the Chicagoland area. No one knows how the bottles were laced with cyanide and then placed back on the store shelves. Lynn came into possession of one of those bottles and shortly after returning home from the hospital, she ingested one of the poisoned pills. Unlike the other 6 victims, Lynn did not die right away. She laid in the hospital on life support after being declared brain dead. Eventually, her family made the gut-wrenching decision to pull the plug.
Lynn did not have an easy life but her last years on this earth had gotten better and she was extremely happy. She was the mother of four, including the newborn. Her life with her new husband Ed had its trials and tribulations but things were finally coming around and she was excited about the future.
At her funeral, as I watched them lower her casket into her grave, the thought about God came to me like a lightning bolt. I walked away from the graveside crying. My husband tried to comfort me but I was angry. “How can there be a God who allows this to happened?” I asked him.
I never got over that unanswered question. The more I would dwell on it and try to figure it out, the more I came to the conclusion that religion is just a fantasy. People want to believe there is a better life than this one so they hold that thought to make this life seem like a stepping stone to a better place.
The more time that passed without an arrest, the more I became convinced that not only is there’s no god, but there is also no justice.
Then came the attack on the World Trade Towers on 9/11. That did it for me. Any doubt that I had that maybe I was wrong about God came tumbling down as sure as those towers did. When I have asked religious people where God was on 9/11 they tell me that he was saving people by delaying the father who stopped to vote, the man who was late for worked, the person who missed the train. Hogwash. If there was a God he could have stopped those terrorists from getting on the plane. He could have stopped them from thinking about killing in the first place.
The religious people than play the “free will” card. I am not buying that either.
The God I was taught about by the nuns was portrayed as a loving God. If he is a loving God I have many questions for him. Why are children murdered? Why are innocent, good people tortured, murdered, found guilty of crimes they did not commit? Why?
I also look at the logic, or should I say lack of logic, in religious beliefs. We are to believe such things as an ark with animals floating around for 40 days? How did Noah feed them and care for them? The entire population of the world started with 2 people? An apple changed the course of paradise? A talking snake?
Why would a loving God flood out his own people and kill them in the first place?
I find it very odd that we tell our little children all about the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, and the tooth fairy at the same age that we introduce religion to them. Then a few years later we tell them the Easter Bunny, Santa, and the tooth fairy do not exist but all the other stories we told you about Adam and Eve, miracles and God are all true.
It just doesn’t make sense.
