Most of my life I’ve had friends who were from the same school of thought as I am. These are your regular wholesome Christian boys and girls who dutifully go to church so as not anger their parents. Out of these friends I had most of them just went as a duty to their parents and only got into the deep believing part with age as I did. It took adulthood and ultimately university to free my mind of the fear of exploring Christianity and its umbrella religion as a whole. It is in varsity when I first met subjects such as philosophy and psychology where I could really apply my mind to evaluating religion and ultimately my religion of birth, Christianity. It was in university when I started reading and exploring other religions and finding that my God isn’t as absolute as I was raised to think and that the world is not united on the definition and the upholding of morality. It is also in university where I encountered atheists for the first time. I never understood them very well and I must say I was utterly shocked by the balls they had to even openly denounce God the maker of all. As shocked as I was by the mere size of their balls I remember that their beliefs or rather non-belief was based on solid reason. It is that reasoning that kept my mind on a constant fever for many nights.
It was only until two years back where I met and befriended an atheist where I had the time to poke, peruse and properly evaluate the mind of the atheist. My findings were surprising and I must state collapsed my already unstable belief system into a million pieces. The cause behind atheist’s massive balls is their seemingly faultless reasoning. With faultless reasoning comes great consideration and I must say. Out of the people I’ve met from different walks of life, religion, culture and religion I found the atheist to be the most moral out of all of them. This got me asking, “is it better to be a moral atheist or an immoral Christian?”
To even begin evaluating such a question I had to define what morality is. On dictionary.com the definition of morality is: “of, pertaining to, or concerned with the principles or rules of right conduct or the distinction between right and wrong; ethical: moral attitudes” As dictionaries go the list obviously goes on and much is mentioned about the variations of the word and how it applies to different situations. What seems to be an underlying factor is “conformity to rules/principles/ethics pertaining to the conduct of self” The thing about morality is you could go on for years defining, refining and concluding what it is because different people have their own little amendments to the word in order to appease themselves and some to intertwine with their religion and set of beliefs. I would like to keep the definition simple. A moral person to me is one that pursues happiness/lives their lives carefully so as not to screw anyone over in any way possible.
Growing up in church was amazing. So many teachings on being a better person, being helpful to others, giving to the less fortunate, humility and many other teachings that if implemented correctly would make the world a much better place. Even when perusing other religions I found similar teachings all preaching that if every individual worked together in NOT screwing each other over heaven would be ours.
The bombshell is that as much as religion is seemingly of good nature, it is now intricately intertwined with capitalism which is all about bludgeoning your neighbour for your individual gain. A dead white man once said “Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right." I fear that Laurens Van der Post was horribly right in this statement because as I digged deeper into what I found about the mainstream religions is that as much they all seem to serve a similar god they all claim to be the one and only way which frightens me because this is the same flow of thought that caused some of the worlds biggest tragedies and mass murders such as the World War II holocaust and many other religiously based wars and terrors committed by humans to humans. In his mind, Hitler was completely right in what he did and he saw nothing wrong with it. I could go on for ages about religion and what bad it has contributed to the world but then this piece would turn out to be too long and black people wouldn’t read it. But I’m sure you get my point.
The point is that I have met a countless number of extremely religious people and I have met less than a handful of atheists of which according to my experience, are far more willing to live peacefully amongst their brothers and sisters than most of their Christian counterparts. I think this is partly because as much as religion (Christianity to be specific) offers a shortcut. We serve a God of infinite second chances. What this means is that you can mess around as much as you want as long as you apologise. We all know it’s far easier to get forgiveness than to get permission. The atheists on the other hand believe in solid reasoning and hold themselves accountable for every fault other than making outside “factors” the blame.
If you have been following my writings you would have realised by now that I never really conclude adequately simply because I don’t have the answers to my questions. I don’t like making decisions for anyone but myself but I do love to share my thoughts. My brothers and sisters I ask again, Is it better to be a moral atheist or an immoral Christian?
Just My Thoughts... What are yours?
Ntsiki nXuBa
Twitter Me: http://twitter.com/Ntsiki_CreeperZ
Facebook: Ntsiki Mayekiso
