Why You Don't Need God...

...if you happen to think like I do.

At the beginning of my remembered life, Sunday mornings were reserved for God and eventually Thursdays were set aside for Boy Scout meetings. My maternal grandparents had been heavily involved in Scouts, so my brother and I joining was an inevitability. In both cases, though, with both church and Scouting, I was unable to see the point of attending pretty early on. I found church boring. If I was learning anything, it was just about the contents of the Christian Bible. There were obvious and appreciable moral imperatives being tossed about, but certainly nothing that required faith to enact. With the Boy Scouts, I at least did learn some basic skills involving camping and survival training, but I felt no pride in being a Scout. Between the Sunday mornings and Thursday evenings, I was losing a day of life every week to organizations that were forced upon me. Thankfully I cut both of these off many years ago.

I never bothered to openly identify myself as a non-believer until high school. Class discussions occasionally bordered on personal religious ideals, and for some teachers I was the token atheist. While I don't mean to stereotype, the resulting open conversations in class ended up being me, with godless liberal ideas, versus the hardcore religious and some fairly hateful feelings toward gay neighbors ("I should be able to have a say on whether or not someone gay moves in next door to me."), crime reduction (can't remember specifics, but racism was common), and how to create world peace (god's love stopping war vs. love of a god starting wars). Due to the characters I had to interact with, I became an angry atheist. I wasn't into vandalism or public and personal attacks against religious people, but I definitely made fun of my religious friends for having religious beliefs. To me, it was a sign of stupidity. It was only later that I realized I didn't care about someone having religious beliefs unless they were evangelizing.

Accepting the people I love who are religious became more confusing as time went by. I think a lot of atheist and atheist-leaning agnostics have a hard time coming to terms with people who are wonderful save their religious affiliations. These are the same people with whom I had initially been slightly caustic in hopes that I could make them rethink their belief in a higher power just the slightest bit. I still didn't understand what part of them needed religion. Now, though, I am able to see a distinct difference between various types of religious people, and I understand why some people feel that being religious is acceptable.

I recommend you watch this whole video:

(Note: Neil deGrasse Tyson has lots of fantastic videos in various places on the web, and I recommend any and all of them.)

Now, considering what I am against is both organized religion AND the idea of faith, I would gladly accept the label "agnostic" or "agnostic atheist". I have no beliefs until there is proof. This is a bit of a difference from how most people would identify me if asked, and that's because I tend to identify myself as an atheist even if that isn't the case. I think the reason for that is it's more of a shock for the naive if I say I'm an atheist as opposed to undecided. I've read numerous accounts online of the surprised reactions of religious acquaintances when a nice person reveals himself or herself as an atheist. The typical reaction? "But you're such a nice person!" Sigh.

After seeing the above video, I think there's something to be said for filling the unknown with the imaginary, but I see no excuse for a belief that some sort of omniscient and omnipotent being oversees daily life. There is a huge gap between questions we've asked and questions we have yet to ask about our universe. As far as questions we have asked, there's a huge gap between ones we've answered and ones we haven't. Somewhere in the quest to feel a sense of community and fill these gaps, groups of people have decided to overwrite answers where they have no right to. Groups that believe the world is flat and 6,000 years old need to rethink their priorities. I know intelligent and loving people who are religious regardless, and I've realized that it's just because they are one of a very common sort of person. My only wish is that more religious people would be like them.

The world is changing, though. As the generations roll over, the American population is becoming less homophobic, less religious, and more distant from other antiquated feelings. This is one of the few things that would give me hope for the future if I knew what hoping felt like.

Why You Don't Need College...

…if you happen to be me. I haven’t even told all of my friends yet. Here it is, though: I’m dropping out of college. How many semesters in I am or how many are left before a degree is irrelevant, honestly. I’ve had a love/hate relationship with post-secondary education from the start. Varying circumstances from year to year and semester to semester left me feeling either very excited about my education or yearning to be away from it all. It wasn’t until the past month or so that I actually realized I could be doing something else with my time and not wasting my parents’ money.

As most high school students know – and hell, even people who aren’t in high school if they have access to any sort of heavily used medium for the exchange of information – there is a substantial amount of pressure on graduating seniors to have plans for college in place well before they receive their diploma. Everyone knows that you can’t be successful or even a respected person if you don’t get a college degree to supplement your high school education. The sad part is that, to some extent, they’re absolutely right.

First, it should be noted that not all degrees are made equal. I love writing. There is a sad part of me that always wanted to be an English major, but I had no desire to turn an English education into some form of hardcore linguistic study nor to teach other people how to properly use the language. My only interests as far as English goes are posting to blogs (clearly) and writing books. Do you need a degree for this? No. This realization made me think that I wouldn’t be so bad off getting a degree in something that was easy for me but did not “light my fire”, so to speak.

I started off college with my major being Engineering Physics with a concentration in Computer and Electrical Engineering. My love of physics in high school due to an excellent teacher (RIP Mr. Ridgeway) carried me through the first two semesters of college with no troubles. Coming back after my first summer away, though, left me with no academic momentum. I had expected my classes to pull me back into the subjects, but perhaps I had been spoiled by the engaging staff at my high school. There’s something deeply terrifying about realizing, halfway through a semester, that you have no interest anymore in pursuing a career in your chosen major. Would it have been cool to say I was an engineer living on an engineer’s salary? Of course! But the hoops they were holding up for me to jump through were in my range of capability and beyond my range of motivation.

A new major was on my horizon. I thought about Mathematics, having had a strong intuitive grasp of math throughout my schooling, but I felt like it was something that would be both easy and at the same time far less enjoyable than a physics-related degree path. Having also been around computers for all of my life (my father has been a systems analyst for our state for 40+ years), Computer Science seemed natural and, after some investigation, kind of fun! There are some instantly rewarding things you can learn with a computer education that make it seem so satisfying at the outset. The rewarding feeling ramps up with the difficulty, too. “You just wrote a program that calculates factorials!” vs. “You just wrote a text-based game that generates a map based on a text file and allows you to move around killing monsters and collecting items!” The workload for creating that game was significantly higher than my initial foray into variables and recursion, but it was amazing to me to think that I was playing through a game with the source code in a window right behind it…and I wrote it. I developed an interest in artificial intelligence. I started wondering about the differences in the back ends of programs that caused performance differences. This is some heavy stuff if a year ago you had always just wondered how to make a complex program.

Clearly my beginning education with programming and programming methods had made an impact on me, but I don’t think it was the one my teachers had hoped for. Rather than trying to gear myself up to learn more from them so that I could improve my programming, I realized that all I wanted to do now was code things for myself so that I could prepare for self-employment later in life. I had no doubt that I would end up in some sort of programming-related career, but I was suddenly finding the teaching methods at my school dense and horribly paced.

The Internet contains a lot of information. A lot of it is rarely accessed, but even given that some of the information on it is more valuable than others, it ought to be a horribly inefficient place for teaching yourself things. On the contrary, it has been specifically developed so that you may access just about any necessary bit of data at lightning speed. While I was pleased with my newfound interests in programming, I was horrified to find that my school was actually less efficient than the Internet at teaching me how to code.

So here’s my point: I wanted an education. I picked a school. I figured out what I wanted to learn. Then, I figured out that they couldn’t teach me. What I regret now is that I didn’t discover sooner that I could teach myself programming faster with online resources (and in some cases with better teachers). So! While the Internet is not a place to go if you want to be an electrical engineer, never accept that you must go to college if you want your life to be enjoyable. Lots of job postings do want a bachelor’s degree, but there is no guarantee that being granted the job will be worth the money or time you spent on the degree. This is time that I cannot waste any longer.

What are my life plans now? Numerous. That is perhaps the clearest answer I can give you. I will be moving across the country. I will eventually be starting my own business (with a partner). I will be playing in a band. I will be producing a show. Most importantly, I will be living a life in which I produce things, beautiful things, that make me happy. I don’t need college in order to make beautiful things.