agnosticism.

religion.

what is it?

why is it?

and how can i believe?

people like having religion around. it's something to which they can hold. it's their hope that gets them through tougher times. it explains the afterlife or lack thereof. but i just can't see what this faith is founded on.

it would be an oversimplification to say that i think god is to man merely as imaginary friend is to child. faith is more complex than that. i think a less offensive analogy would be to say that god is like language. you grow up surrounded by a presence of particular vowels, a given set of consonant combinations, and those are the ones you learn to recognize. and the older you get, the harder it is to add new sounds to that familiar set of phonetics. of course, it's possible to embrace the new sounds later in life, but it's harder. it happens less often. that's why there are chinese-speaking people who spend a lifetime trying to learn the difference between r's and l's and w's--liquid consonants, the linguists call them--but to no avail.

it's just that for me, god is that difference between those liquid consonants. i get by just fine without understanding and embracing the concept of him. it's not like the lack of god is creating some gaping void in my soul, like something's missing. but i'll confess:

i tried to believe

i can't believe

there's no way to believe

not when i have questions and i'm not buying the answers that organized religion offers.

i mean, there's the whole question of whether or not a god/higher power/supreme being even exists, and since there's no proof (and yet, maybe faith is the only proof necessary), i remain thoroughly agnostic in regards to that issue.

no, what bothers me is death. heaven. hell.

it's accepted that the body decomposes into molecules and atoms and ATP particles for use by small organisms. or it turns into ash. whichever one is chosen for the dead. but what happens to the soul?

the consciousness is life. it feels like an intangible tangle of energy, and you know what they say about energy--that it can be neither created nor destroyed. it's bothersome to not know where this consciousness goes after perception in the physical body fades from the third dimension to the zeroth dimension, where there's nothing at all--no space, no pain, no color. even the word nothing probably doesn't fit quite right, because there's no perception of absence. no existence at all. or at least that's how i imagine it.

so where does the consciousness go, anyway? one would think that it has to go somewhere. heaven doesn't really make sense to me and neither does hell. why? maybe i'm too worldly. maybe i'm too dependent on logic and proof. but the whole idea of collecting souls into two ever-increasing groups as individuals die each day just seems too inefficient to be true. i'd like to believe that when i close my eyes to die, my consciousness will leave my body and be placed inside the being of another, and when i open my eyes again i will begin a new existence. souls could be immortal that way, making experiences anew with the same ageless bundles of breath and spirit time and time again.

but there's no way of knowing if that's true, so i guess i'll never know.

and yet

there's a part of me that wants somebody to come along and prove me wrong.