I’m not a very religious person. Never truly was, either. Save for my pre-high school years when I was too afraid to question the existence of a god, I have generally been skeptical of the credibility of organized religion. I’ve never been particularly spiritual, either. Faith without man-made structure also didn’t appeal to me. I guess it was too open to interpretation for my tastes. Until recently, my lack of faith in a divine creator hadn’t affected me much. I generally just slunk out of bed and began cracking away at my regular routine every day, just like everybody else on this planet. No need to go to church, either. Just another meatbag doing his thing. For a while, it worked pretty well. I stopped having nightmares about going to hell, and a philosophy class gave me newfound understanding of the god argument. I was set. Now, things are a bit different. The gears are still turning, I’m still going to work and taking classes, but the enjoyment seems ever so slowly to be sapped out of everything I do. I’m still on the mundane routine of life, but now I’ve got a gaping hole in my body where my ‘soul’ should be. I’m feeling empty inside, and it’s not pleasant. This sucks, and it’s not going away. I’m assuming these feelings of incompleteness stem from my lack of faith in eternal life/heaven/wherever we’re supposed to go after we die. It may have taken a while to fully kick in, but my rejection of eternal salvation is starting to burn me. As a kid, heaven was the coolest thing ever, and it got me so excited I would sometimes daydream for hours on end about all the great stuff there would be to do there. But my rejection of religion and my separation from that which made me feel good as a little kid is giving me a problem. Unfortunately, I can’t go back to that old way of thinking. Not without a complete memory erasure that is. Eternal salvation is a pretty desirable thing after all. I’m starting to regret my decision to deny my share of it, regardless of its validity or lack thereof. Heck, as of late, I’ve even been mulling over the idea of studying some spiritual belief systems so I might gain new perspective on my life and on the world around me. All this just so I can quell these uncomfortable feelings sprouting up from inside my ‘hellip; body. Or possibly just so I can have that comfort of knowing I’m ‘special’ and eternal salvation is just 50 years and 2605 more church visits away. I didn’t have to think about this so much as a kid. Now the whole atheism thing is biting me in the rear end, like a Doberman Pinscher on crack. Being a simple college student with an extremely limited understanding of the world around me, I’m not going to adamantly assert whether or not a god or gods exist. That would be impossible to prove. But after learning more and more about the true probability of a god actually existing (based on scientific methods and not dogmatic assumptions), I don’t think I can go back down the religious path. I can never be sure whether or not a supreme being actually exists. And I would rather believe in nothing than in something false. What I want is merely the comfort which came from ‘knowing’ that heaven would await me upon my mortal death. (Whoa, cool band name – Mortal Death) What I’m saying is this: religion makes you feel a lot better about yourself in the long run. You feel like your life matters in the grand scope of things and that you’ve got a ticket to God Almighty’s exclusive afterdeath hotel for only his most obedient followers and that you’re one of them. Too bad I can’t think like that anymore. Looking forward to heaven sure made me feel better about myself as a kid. I felt important and special – and then I learned everyone is special. Which makes nobody special. Forget this. If I can’t look forward to heaven, I can always wait for hell. I’m going to go listen to Slayer. Hell awaits.