By accident, while using a YouTube video downloader I was able to view a 30 minute clip of 50 famous influential thinkers and began to watch with gusto what I thought was a compilation of affirmations to the existence of God. To my shock, it was the opposite. I was hearing Nobel laureates, philosophers, anthropologists, chemists, physicists and mathematicians explain why their atheism. It made sense of course because I tend to partial toward empirical evidence. There were two instances in the video that caught my attention: David Attenborough's comment that the same god that created the earth (of which he so vividly describes in the Planet Earth series for the BBC) and the worm that was eating up the eyes of this child in Africa who was just waiting for imminent blindness; and this physicist's simple answer when asked if he believed that when we die there is no life after death, he simply said no.
It haunted me the whole weekend what this all meant and how knowing it could potentially change my life. It made me question everything I know about my faith, having been Catholic since birth, how early on in grade school I became lax with the ceremonies because I found them unrelatable and useless. I began thinking that perhaps the reason why I think my prayers are not being heard is because there's really no one that would hear me. It made more sense that the world came about because of random incidences and to some degree, luck; that in life you are either favored by the universe or you're not. Some people just have it and some don't. Success as the result of your own decisions and the right timing. It led me to think that the only thing that mattered is your happiness now, not guilt, not heaven, not hell.
It made me look back on all the significant moments of my life. Was there really a time when I felt the presence of the Lord, not a faith borne of fear or tradition?
