In a nutshell: why no woman should ever want to be religious.

New Year, New Me.

It's kind of interesting that in the midst of sadness and hard times, the incessant longing for happier times can make the person suffering unable to see some of the positive things that are coming from the changes that caused the initial sadness. Anything that causes profound sadness is likely to also teach you invaluable life lessons. Since you cannot escape feeling sadness from time to time, it is best to just ride it out and rather than get stuck in abyss, try to focus on the lessons you are learning from whatever has caused the pain. In other words: make the best of it. Don't allow yourself to become a victim.

Someone dear to me once told me: "The moment you think your life is perfect means it's probably not."

I think the challenge there is to never get TOO comfortable or settled in any one point in your life, no matter how good it is, and to realize that happiness, like sadness, is transitory. The goal, I think, is to be happy in a moment but recognize it can change and make sure you know how to make yourself happy, separate of any one person or thing. While not easy or foolproof, knowing you have things that fulfill you as an individual will keep you on track when unwanted changes happen in your life.

Sometimes when you suffer it's because you weren't equipped to deal with the situation that has presented itself to you. If you do not let your pain teach you how better deal with such situations, history will repeat itself. If you do, you emerge from the pain, stronger, wiser, and less likely to be as affected by similar situations when they inevitably occur again.

Mother Teresa...an atheist?

Modern Christians have touted Mother Theresa as an inspiration for faith and religious compassion for decades. Turns out, she didn't believe in God when she died. She renounced her faith, and even though she desperately wanted to believe in God, she no longer could. Her work with children in Calcutta, India's slums made it difficult for the former woman of faith to remain a believer, though she began her work there citing "a calling", based on unquestioned faith.

This article spoke to me because if there is a sole reason for why I can't believe in a Biblical God it is because of the sheer amount of suffering I see in the world. Surely a rational person can agree that not all who suffer somehow deserve their suffering, as religion would have you believe.

"Where is my faith?" she wrote. "Even deep down… there is nothing but emptiness and darkness...If there be God — please forgive me." "Such deep longing for God…Repulsed, empty, no faith, no love, no zeal," she said. "What do I labor for?" she asked in one letter. "If there be no God, there can be no soul. If there be no soul then, Jesus, You also are not true."

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/08/23/eveningnews/main3199062.shtml
(Found on Reddit: "What is the most interesting thing you know?")

Absolution does not exist.

“Nobody ever did, or ever will, escape the consequences of his choices." 
-Alfred A. Montapert

So, what does the Bible tell us?

Some things to contemplate...

I am not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief is positively harmful. Reviewing the false claims of religion, I do not wish, as some sentimental materialists affect to wish, that they were true. I do not envy believers their faith. I am relieved to think that the whole story is a sinister fairy tale; life would be miserable if what the faithful affirmed was actually the case.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, Letters to a Young Contrarian

It is not hardness of heart or evil passions that drive certain individuals to atheism, but rather a scrupulous intellectual honesty.
STEVE ALLEN, 2000 Years of Disbelief

If you are right to believe that religious faith offers the only real basis for morality, then atheists should be less moral than believers. In fact, they should be utterly immoral. Are they? Do members of atheist organizations in the United States commit more than their fair share of violent crimes? Do the members of the National Academy of Sciences, 93 percent of whom do not accept the idea of God, lie and cheat and steal with abandon? We can be reasonably confident that these groups are at least as well behaved as the general population. And yet, athiests are the most reviled minority in the United States.

SAM HARRIS, Letter to a Christian Nation


If he is infinitely good, what reason should we have to fear him?
If he is infinitely wise, why should we have doubts concerning our future?
If he knows all, why warn him of our needs and fatigue him with our prayers?
If he is everywhere, why erect temples to him?
If he is just, why fear that he will punish the creatures that he has filled with weaknesses?
If grace does everything for them, what reason would he have for recompensing them?
If he is all-powerful, how offend him, how resist him?
If he is reasonable, how can he be angry at the blind, to whom he has given the liberty of being unreasonable?
If he is immovable, by what right do we pretend to make him change his decrees?
If he is inconceivable, why occupy ourselves with him?
If he has spoken, why is the universe not convinced?
If the knowledge of a God is the most necessary, why is it not the most evident and the clearest?
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, The Necessity of Atheism

Not omniscient? Or, malicious?