I emailed this to my instructor and I wanted to put it here too so that I could remember it later and reflect on it in a week or two or something.

I’m not a vocally participative person. But I do have a response to your lecture today. I’m someone that could talk and debate for the rest of eternity if you get me on a subject I’m interested in, so if my occasional responses get irritating, please let me know.

As far as the religion, I grew up in a household that went to church maybe seven days a year (when we went up to see my great-grandmother), so it was never engrained in me to go to church and the religious things that are for other people. But I was always curious so I went to a few churches and none of them provided me with the answers I sought. So I went to a few more, asked some questions, and people got upset with me too or put me down because I was just some heathen since I didn’t know anything about religion or God. If you slam a door in my face, I probably won’t come back. And I didn’t. I never got the answers I was curious about, and so I thought long and hard about my own beliefs and I came to the conclusion that I did not believe in any sort of God or deity, did not believe in the metaphysical concept of a soul, did not believe in such a place as heaven and hell.

Not too long ago, maybe a year at best, I saw a program in which a doctor was featured who had successfully transplanted the entire head of one monkey, onto the body of an unrelated monkey. Do you know what happened? It woke up, breathed, and bit him. So I ask you, is there a such thing as a soul in the metaphysical context in which religions like to think of it? My conclusion was negative.

At that very point in time I threw religion out the window completely because that fully disproved to me the existence of the metaphysical soul, the entity that goes to this wonderful place called “Heaven” and also disproved the existence of a God of any sort because I cannot understand how, since the monkey woke up, there can be such a place as heaven, hell, a God that watches over everything and takes the good people to “Heaven” when they die. Over the almost 24 years I’ve been alive I’ve also come to the realization that the people around me, most of the time, always gave me false information and so I was forced to seek out the information on my own. My mother would tell me something like leprechauns exist, and I’d go to school all excited “Leprechauns are real! They exist!” and I’d be made a fool of because she was wrong, almost always. So I realized at a very young age that if I wanted to know anything, that I’d need to ask around. Sometimes the questions I had people got angry at me over, in fact most of the time they would, and I learned… not to care whether someone got angry with me over my questions or not.

I had questions, and I believe the only stupid question is the one that you (consciously) already have the answer to, and I didn’t have the answer to the questions I was asking. I remember one of the churches I attended when I was little, and I attended because a friend of mine did, I went to the Sunday school thing, and I remember one of the first things that I was told was that if you watch MTV you’re going to go to Hell. I remember asking them why we were going to hell if we watched MTV, and I remember asking them if we even glanced at if we were going to Hell. They got irritated with me about asking about why we were going to hell, and I never got an answer, but I remember they told me that it didn’t matter if we even accidentally watched it, we were still going to hell. That did nothing more than raise more questions that they didn’t answer including why is it my fault if my mother, for example, flipped through channels and I happened to be right there next to her. I also remember asking one of the instructors, whatever you call them I’m not sure, if I had to believe in Hell and if it was wrong that I didn’t.

I don’t remember his answer anymore, but I remember walking out wondering if it was possible that a six year old girl be condemned to hell for something that wasn’t her fault, and what kind of a God would allow that. That’s one of the major events that sparked my lack of faith in the whole subject. I still wonder that today and I still haven’t come up with a good answer in the slightest. I’m a very down to earth person, as a result of all of my thinking because I found it hard over the years to just take what any Joe told me and believe in it. I remember a speech I once heard in which this guy was talking about different things and one of the things he said was “Don’t take what someone tells you and believe it just because they told you to. I could tell you that the sky was red, and tell you to believe it, but would it make it true?”

And that’s always stuck with me because it made a lot of sense to me, and my personal history since almost everything anyone in my family ever told me was a lie or otherwise just simply untrue. I’m pretty solid in what I believe, and I have a reason for my beliefs and when I come up on something that I find I don’t know why I believe it, I have a tendency to examine it and find a reason why I believe it, and if I can’t find a reason, it usually goes out the window. I need more reason than “because I was told to believe it” or “because that’s what I was taught” or “because that’s how my family believes”. Those answers don’t work for me like they seem to for everyone else; they never really have. I have a question though; in another class I have to write a reflective journal (and it seems a little redundant since there isn’t much thinking required for it), but why is it you don’t have us do that for this one?

It would seem to me that a class that is based upon thought would at least recommend some sort of reflective journal that’s either collected at some point or not collected. I’m just curious; as far as the response that I would normally get regarding why am I not journaling on my own since I think it would be a good idea for a class like this, I actually have an online journal I have a tendency to reflect in which this email will be going into so I can remember it. Anyway yeah I don’t expect a response, I’m sure you have better things to do than respond to a hundred students’ reflective emails but I just wanted to reflect anyway.

Have a good weekend.  :)