Nineteen

Oh nineteen, how I love thee. I decided that the best thing I could do was find some happy people and study them. When I really started paying attention, I noticed a pattern. Happy people who didn't wear a big fake smile usually didn't go to church. Most people are happy to identify with a religion without understanding it's dogma. Wow. Try talking to these people as a Christian and they shrug their shoulders at you. Try talking to these people as an atheist and it's the same. They have no idea what they believe, or what they're supposed to believe, they just follow the herd.

It immediately became important for me to see atheists at play. I was told I was in for extreme amounts of evil, but I wasn't convinced. Christians were wrong about a lot of things. People seemed willfully ignorant in general.

I met this girl at work who invited me to her birthday party. She had purple hair and swore a lot. She smoked and drank. Perfect. I decided, once again, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to do it right. So I went to her party and I was shocked. I was in a new world I had never been around. These people were friendly. I wasn't dressed like them and they still accepted me and were extremely nice to me. The birthday girl's best friend was my boss, TD. I started hanging out with those two every day.

We roller skated, we played with fluffy kittens, we sang songs, we bought toys at target and played in the back yard. We drank and smoked and hugged. We never did anything evil. In fact, it was a common interest of ours to make other people happy. TD and I shared that trait. I fell head over heals for TD. She loved me for who I was. She never judged me or told me how to live my life. She never talked about religion. I had so much fun with her that I forgot that the original plan was to learn about atheists. One day I remembered to ask, and found out she was an atheist. She believed that when we die that's it.

The most wonderful, loving, caring, selfless person I had ever befriended... The first person to lift me up from the floor and dust me off and encourage me to do what I dreamed... The first peer that ever believed in me, was an atheist.

Whether it was true that she was the only atheist like this didn't matter. (FYI there are LOTS more like her) What mattered was that Christianity had kept me from feeling happy, and made me feel guilty for wanting me to feel happy. Christianity not only took away from my life, it forbid me to talk to those who could change my mind. It's not because atheists are evil, it's because atheists make sense and are nicer than Christians. They have more compassion for humanity. They do their best to be awesome humans, because there is nothing else. They aren't evil at all. Christianity lied to me. It scared me in order to keep me from learning the truth.

I haven't been tricked, either. I've been happy. All this time I've been happy. I do what I want to do now, without fear that god will hear my thoughts and be ashamed of me. What do I want to do? I want to self-actualize. This is my greatest goal. I want to make other people happy. Not by changing them, but by being there for them and listening to them. I declared myself agnostic at this point. The creation is more important than the creator. To live like it's not is foolish.