There are things that mildly cheese me off, like people walking slow in front of me or sudden loud noises, or the rotter across the quad who blasts his tasteless music at obscene levels during finals week or the fact the bathroom smelled like pot earlier this week and made me smell like pot afterwards, or people not doing their dishes or being late.
Then there are the things that make me chew on my keyboard with rage. There are a lot of these. Most are related to politics. If I were to address all of these, I would probably miss my next three classes and bore everyone to pieces, so I will refrain and talk about one thing that is rather central to a lot of the issues in US politics right now: religion. More accurately, my lack of one and the way it is perceived, and why that perception and the way right-wing leaders talk about it really pisses me off.
Firstly, I have really good reasons for being an agnostic. I wasn't always one. I won't go into the details of why exactly I lost my faith, but I did. And it was a loss. I do miss it sometimes, because it would be comforting, and those of my friends who are religious are very happy with it. It was not something I consciously chose to do.
When I say that my lack of faith wasn't a choice, I mean it. At this point in my life, I am completely unable to believe in a higher power. That may change; it changed in the past. But it's not like I woke up one morning and told myself, "I'm going to deny the existence of God because I want to".
Secondly, I'm not an atheist. I may say that when I'm arguing, because it's a shorter word and I'm not thinking straight because I'm mad, but atheism implies certainty; I am a scientist, and the existence of God is a hypothesis that cannot be empirically tested. It would involve just as much faith to say that God didn't exist as it would to believe She did. I'm not an agnostic because I can't make up my mind over whether I want to believe in God or not. It's simply being logical. (Aside: A lot of scientists believe in God, even us horrid biologists with our nasty Theory of Evolution. Darwin believed in God and thought of evolution as the way God had decided to make the world work.)
Thirdly, the fact that I do not belong to a faith does not mean that I am immoral, amoral or otherwise lacking in the conscience department. I have a conscience. It does not carry a big stick so much as it carries a 300 pound battleaxe. It just runs along a set of rules that don't require a central deity, and the lack of said deity does not mean that I am going to go around viciously savaging people with my axe-like wit and a grapefruit.
Not having faith isn't depressing, either. Whenever I need cheering up, I go outside and look at a tree, or a beetle or any other sort of living things. There are a lot of wonderful things in the world that I enjoy. There are a lot of really ugly things, too, but one can ignore them for a little while when looking at the wing of a butterfly or the play of shadows on the grass under a tree.
I'm happy with the way I am now. If I regain faith, it'll be on my own time, in my own way. It'll happen or it won't, and it's something personal to me. I hate people trying to convert me. I hate people telling me that I'm a bad person because I don't believe what they do, or that my lack of belief is an inherently bad thing. I hate people pitying me for that. I hate people trying to force these beliefs on me through religiously-based laws. (Saying 'God' in the Pledge of Allegiance bugged me. It was more or less lying because I was basically saying I thought He existed when I didn't, which I'm pretty sure is wrong whosever standpoint you look at it from.)
If someone does have faith, whatever it is, good. Enjoy it. As long as it doesn't hurt anyone and you're not trying to force it on me, it's none of my business, and I expect people to regard my lack of faith the same way.
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