The Atheist

Wrote this one around 2 years ago. It was too long to be published in any newspaper and I was too lazy and reluctant to shorten it down. Although there have been drastic change in my views regarding the concept of religion and this piece isn't 'updated' and I don't believe a lot of stuff here any more  still wanted to fill a few columns:

At the age of 12 I withdrew my belief in ‘God’. I don’t know the reason of my 'atheistical behavior' at that time. Maybe it was the pressure from school, maybe it was my loneliness, but the fact remains that I forgot the reason. What surprises me is that I took that decision at the young age of 12.At first, I felt pride in walking down a road without the fear someone watching over me. Like a bird which had freed itself from the fetters, but was still in the cage. I’ll be honest, I guess I had taken too much pride in being ‘free’ and had even taken the privilege of boasting about my state to a few of my believer friends. Almost coincidentally, I faced twists you might expect to see in an M. Night Shyamalan movie (or maybe not). I almost failed in English, got late for school the day I had a test and barely had time to complete it, almost got a fracture, became the class monitor (oh yes it IS a pain in the butt). 

Well actually these are just a few of the misfortunes I remember. But what I do remember is that time period was one of the worst I faced. Now sometimes I wonder why is it that we notice something when something else supposedly affects it. For example; a person notices how much weight he/she has gained when he/she watches a fashion pageant. 

Maybe these things that I experienced were taken as misfortunes by me just because of my recent disbelief in god but still being unable to forget my past and falling back to it. Perhaps these events were meant to happen.

 Maybe I should’ve studied a bit hard for the test. Maybe I should have woken up a little earlier to get in time for my test. Maybe I should have been more careful while skating. Maybe I shouldn’t have seated in a way that the teacher notices me and decides on making me the class monitor (?!!). Maybe….maybe these events were avoidable. Or were they? I can’t really say. 

The thing is, I was too young to think this way at that time. So I gave up my ‘opposition’ against the godly figure, who according to me was punishing me in his own way. Even though my mother knew of my actions she was pretty sure I would turn back to ‘him’. You see, my parents never really pressed me against an idea, religion or a belief. Maybe they wanted me to find out what was best for me, myself. They still do. About two years later, I looked back at the time when I gave up a path that I had chosen willingly and felt a certain shame inside of me. At that time I had read lot about religious and racial discrimination and had realized that it somewhat began around us. Can’t really say how. Is it because I don’t have the courage to feel criticism? No. It is simply because I believe that some things can be avoided by excluding a few lines from a topic that need not be more controversial than it already is.

Let me give you an example, a person of the ‘X’ religion is likely to keep some distance from a ‘Y’ person the moment he/she knows about his/her religion. He/she acts quiet normally till the time the certain information is disclosed to him/her. People start drawing conclusions about someone’s characters on the basis of their religion. I’m guessing about 80% would react the way I stated above.

The risk in giving out a rough estimate is the fact that many of the readers may disagree with the fact. The last thing I want are a thousand critics coming up with their own results, which might differ from my own and calling it a more ‘scientific’ or ‘philosophically stable’ conclusion. That actually fills me with a weird sense of fear. At the age of thirteen, I took up Buddhism as my religion. I agreed with a lot of Buddhist ideologies and I still do. Buddhism basically focuses (as far as I know) on excluding your desires. According to Buddha all evil is caused due to a desire and that all the lives in this world are woven into a delicate network. Even if one of the links gets affected, some part of the network around it experiences something similar to it. I like to compare this ‘network’ to a clear pond in the middle of a desert. I read a lot about Buddhist psychology, tried to adapt them practically in my life, hoping I would attain Nirvana someday. It struck me later that my path to Nirvana was a desire itself. I felt pretty weird after realizing this, like I was trying to build a dam across the ocean. By the age of 14, I really couldn’t make out the ‘path’ I was walking on. I wasn’t exactly an atheist but I didn’t believe in the godly figure. I did believe that there was some force which ran the whole universe the way it runs right now. I still do. I had a strong belief that it was the works of nature; I had a whole theory on it. A theory that debunked every supernatural happening and unsolved mystery which was named a ‘miracle’. I believed in my theory. Well, I still do. 

I went to some place with my mother someday; someplace I no longer have in my mind. Like something that erases itself with the pangs of time. What I do remember is walking into a store that sold local tea varieties. My mother walked in and looked for a particular type she liked and a got herself a pack. Mighty expensive it was. At the billing counter the owner somehow saw the discomfort on my mother’s face due to the cost of the tea and offered her a cheaper and supposedly better brand for the same variety. This act of his barraged my mind with questions. Why did he offer my mother a better product whereas he could’ve simply let her buy the expensive one to gain a profit? Was it his ‘costumer first’ point of view? Or was it his fear of ‘God’? I don’t know if ‘God’ exist or if I believe he exists. What I do know that people are inherently good and there is a certain desire which changes them from what they are or what they were. What am I right now? I’m just an explorer who has a long way to go and cant really describe something I haven’t seen.