What if God doesn't exist?

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I began by writing these lines in order to vent myself, comment a little bit on my stance on belief in deities and share my opinion with the multicultural thinking that' coexists' among different Steemit users.

Then I have to make one point quite clear: I consider myself an almost completely skeptical unbeliever. By this I mean, obviously, that I am an atheist (although the term, for reasons I will explain later in this post, is not to my liking). I will now go on to explain more or less why the title of my post.

I grew up in a family that practices different religions (Christian mother, Catholic grandmother and Protestant uncle), so I had different sources to inform me about why a person follows a particular religion. Through a series of events of great impact on my life, about which I will not go into detail, I lived a period of one or two years as an agnostic until I came to the conclusion that I maintain: there is no God. Neither this Abrahamic god worshipped by Christianity, Judaism and Islam, nor any of those who existed and exist in other faiths.

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It's been so long since I stopped believing that I vaguely remember what my thinking was like in the past. Although we are more people than I would have believed at first, today an "atheist" in a nation with a long Catholic tradition like Venezuela is rare, so I have had the opportunity to participate in various conversations with friends, relatives and complete strangers of varied beliefs who, out of curiosity or simple stubbornness, have tried to question or even belittle the fact that I don't believe in deities.

My dislike of the word "atheist" originates from these conversations. Simply because when they talk to me in those terms, they don't see me as the person, but as the atheist. I once heard somewhere:"If there weren't so many people with so many different beliefs, there wouldn't be a need to qualify those we don't believe as atheists."

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The question

"What if you're wrong and God exists? Would you risk a life in hell just because you were stubborn enough not to accept the possibility that you could be wrong?" A friend asked me.
At the moment, I just sighed and answered with another question:"What if I am wrong, would your God be able to send me to hell just because I didn't believe in Him? Doesn't it interest you in the least if I was a good or a bad person, he just wants to be worshipped? That's not a perfect being, that would be some sort of celestial tyrant."

In his silence, I decided to continue:"What if when you die you realize that it is not Jehovah who awaits you in paradise, but Zeus? Should he condemn you to Hades for not following his guidelines?" "You didn't answer my question" was the only thing she said to what I said:"Yes, I would risk it, if when I died I found out that this god of yours exists, he should kneel down and apologize to me and all of humanity".

"Now I ask you, What if God does not exist? What if when you die there is nothing more than the' end of the road'? Is it okay with you that you're wasting your life in a church and keeping some shepherd on alms, when could you spend that time and money on something more productive, on behalf of the human being? Believe in whatever you want, but you should think of the earthly world while you are inhabiting it. Anyway, if God is as good as you say, he shouldn't be angry because one of his' sheep' will be separated from the flock, after all he hasn't been very clear in what direction they should graze"

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Steemian! The story you have just read is entirely my own. I hope you liked it :D.

Translated with DeepL

As always, it would help me a lot if you would leave a comment about what you liked and what you didn't like about this short text and, if you liked it, a positive vote would not hurt me either. Thank you! Thank you!

You can also follow me: @pavonj. I'll be posting more writings of different styles.