the only moment we were alone.

An opinion you probably don’t want to hear.

I think everything in my life would be much easier if I believed in God. In the words of Kurt Vonnegut, “Religion is the tylenol of the masses, and I am so glad it works.”
Well, I have a headache but my tylenol is defective.

Lately, there’s been a bunch of hoopla about my lack of religious beliefs; I am not sure why everyone decided to blow up over this innocuous opinion, since I have been this way for a few years now. Here, it is treated as a defect. Something that is broken and needs to be fixed. Maybe it does need to be fixed. Maybe I do need to be fixed.
Now, I will go in to a background of why, exactly, my life is religion-less and God-less:

Tonight, my mom came in to my room and advised me to pray. Every one seems to believe that if I pray more, I will suddenly reach an epiphany and realize there is a God. Nobody seems to understand that this is a decision I must make on my own, I have to justify it on my own. They don’t realize that I’ve tried the religion thing, the believing thing.. It didn’t work. I went to church every Wednesday, read my bible every night, and prayed frequently. I attempted to surround myself with pious people (soon realizing there are very few in this world). I tried to believe, I really did. I would listen to people talk about their faith in Jesus and how completely doubtless they were. I would pretend I felt the same, I’d smile and nod; I listened intently to sermons, trying desperately to silence the voice of doubt in the back of my head. Every night after church, I would remind myself over and over there was a God. I felt so bad for even thinking that there might not be. God was real. I had to believe in God. Everyone believed in God, right?
But, slowly, I got tired of pretending. I finally admitted, to myself, what had been true all along: I do not have a religion. I do not believe in a higher being.

I don’t understand the idea of God, honestly. The idea of a big man, or spirit, or being running the World and placing us all here seems befuddling and absurd.  It feels, to me, God was something a random bloak created to offer an explanation for why we are alive. Religion quickly stemmed from that. If you look at religions, they all branch from the same basic ideas. Once I heard the argument “the bible has to be real! How could they get all those people to write over the same subjects in one big book!?” Really? How hard is it to write a novel with a bunch of different characters? (Excuse my lack of factual and theological information in my counter-argument; I don’t know a ton about religion, and you can probably theologically prove me wrong. Go ahead. It will, most likely, not change me.)

I’m sorry you can’t save me, only I can save myself.

A close friend asked me a few days ago why I didn’t believe. I said, “I don’t know, it just never made sense to me. I can’t logically explain it, and I can’t justify it. It doesn’t seem real to me. It seems like something people use just to make themselves feel better, like a drug.” He replied with, “There’s so many things we can’t explain, Kelsey. Can you explain love? Can you explain sorrow? Can you explain hope?”

He is right, there are so many unexplainable and so many unjustifiable things in life.
I can’t explain love, but I can feel it.
I can’t explain sorrow, but I can feel it.
I can’t explain hope, but I can feel it.
I can’t explain God,
but I can’t feel it either.

It’s never been there for me, I just finally decided to stop lying to myself and everyone else.