So, it’s come to my understanding that some people are pretty into God. I’m not really sure why; It’s not really my thing. I do have an opinion on it, though. Maybe it’ll be interesting to someone out there.
There is one thing I can say with absolute certainty: God doesn’t do anything. At least, not anymore. I’ve never seen any seas splitting, any water becoming wine, or any dudes walking on H2O that wasn’t below zero degrees Celsius. Everything I have ever seen has been governed by the laws of physics. There are definitely no miracles in modern life. No one will argue with that, at least.
However, some people like to argue that God works in mysterious ways, and that he operates within the bounds of reality. They believe he performs miracles disguised as “chance”. For instance, you could be sick and have a low chance of getting better, but you pray to God and low and behold, you eventually recover. It must be God at work, right?
I find this idea is pretty silly idea though, since if your God actually did do stuff when you prayed, and he looked after his believers, everyone in your religion would have awesome lives. This would be proof of how right your religion is, and everyone would follow it. This doesn’t happen. So, even if God loves you, he certainly shows no preference to you. At least, not in this life. Which leads us to this conclusion:
The only difference the existence of a God will make is when you die.
So, we’ve established that God doesn’t do anything noticeable in our world, but that’s not really the point of God anyway. The biggest effect of God is in the afterlife: where you will go when you die and what will happen there. This is different between religions. I really only know christian beliefs about the subject, so I’m going to talk about that. Feel free to talk about others in the comments.
Based on the Christian belief, when you die, you go to Heaven or Hell. What decides which is basically whether you believed in God and whether you followed the rules of your specific sect of Christianity. Ironically, in the sects I know of, that doesn’t involve being a good person. It mostly involves acquiring forgiveness for your sins. I am going to Hell, not because I am a bad person, but because I don’t do this.
Something that strikes me as odd about the christian belief is the concept of eternity. According to Christians, I will be spending all of eternity in Hell. Now, as humans, when we do something bad and we are punished for it, we learn not to do it and become better people. By that logic, I theorize that hell must be full of the nicest people you will ever meet, since they are constantly being punished for their wrongs. On the other hand, people who went to heaven didn’t necessarily sin less, they simply asked for forgiveness, which means they received reward for nothing (morally speaking). Meaning that people in Heaven would have no requirement to actually be decent people.
It’s kind of a messed up system. I think a religion where you went to hell for a certain amount of time based off how much you sinned would be better. There would still be Heaven, but you couldn’t get there until you had payed for your earthly crimes. The world would be a much better place: everyone would be striving to be the best people possible in order to acheive the smallest stay in hell possible. That is, assuming anyone would follow this religion.
Anyway, I actually have no opinion on what happens to you after death. There is no way to tell except to die. Maybe the Christians are right, maybe the Muslims are right, maybe the the buddhists are right, I don’t know. I do think that there are infinite possibilities, though. Which means that the chance somebody has actually guessed right are pretty low. So I figure it’s likely something no one has come up with.
Although, if how this world works is any indication, likely we just stop being. Which really is okay. You weren’t anything before you were born either, and that didn’t seem to be so bad.