Tag: belief,

Quote from Meggie Royer

My lack of faith in God is not a dilapidated house.It does not need to be razed to the ground or burned down to cinders.I refuse to be the wounded woman on a crossthat you crucify with your disapproval like nails;I will only be the woman who believes in thunderstormsthe same way lightning loves the tops of trees it strikesevery time it gets tired of being pent up in an unforgiving sky,the only difference is that I believe these are natural weather phenomenons,not God’s belly rumbling or synapses firing.When my doorway is filled with groups of peoplewielding religious conversion pamphlets like crossbows,I will be the martyr who steps aside to let the arrowscrack through the plaster in my wall instead of piercing my chest.This is not a eulogy to the believer I could have been.This is a battle cry to the believer I always have been,believer in sunsets like splashes of paint, handholdinglike willow branches brushing one another, new morningsafter old nights spent drowning in despair, believerin love as an entire language instead of a single word.Just because my beliefs align themselves on a different spectrumdoes not mean they are the wrong wavelength or color.And even though I think the universe was created by the Big Banginstead of a God with magic dust shooting from his fingertips,my universe does not contain fewer stars.

Quote from Oliver Gaspirtz

Although I’m an atheist, I try not to crap all over people’s belief in God. It may be nothing more than a placebo, a fairy tale that gives the hopeless hope, but sometimes a little hope is all people need to get through the day. Imagine a unit of soldiers under heavy enemy fire. They are told by their superiors to hold their position, even in the face of overwhelming fire power. The soldiers are being told that reinforcements are on the way, and that thought alone gives them the hope and courage to continue fighting, even if ultimately the reinforcements never arrive. I think some people simply need to believe that God is sending them reinforcements, to get through another day.

Quote from Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

So they trust in the deity of the Old Testament, an incontinent dotard who soiled Himself and the universe with his corruption, a low-budget divinity passing itself off as the genuine article. (Ask the Gnostics.) They trust in Jesus Christ, a historical cipher stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster out of parts robbed from the graves of messiahs dead and buried – a savior on a stick. They trust in the virgin-pimping Allah and his Drum Major Mohammed, a prophet-come-lately who pioneered a new genus of humbuggery for an emerging market of believers that was not being adequately served by existing religious products. They trust in anything that authenticates their importance as persons, tribes, societies, and particularly as a species that will endure in this world and perhaps in an afterworld that may be uncertain in its reality and unclear in its layout, but which states their craving for values “not of this earth” – that depressing, meaningless place their consciousness must sidestep every day.