The original Green Day song was titled “Church on Sunday,” but we’ll just have to make do with our circumstance. Today, January 6th, we celebrated Armenian Christmas by going to church in the morning. Christmas isn’t usually a big deal with my family because we do all the present-giving and food on New Year’s, so there’s never anything special left to do on the 6th. We were planing to stay for the sermon for an hour and a half till 1PM, except it was so freezing cold inside we left forty minutes in. We lit up candles in the–warm–candle room and went out for lunch in the city.
Now I can’t recall the last time I discussed faith or my opinion of it. I’m not a religious person. I was baptised and raised religiously but never managed to believe a word of it. I found loopholes and a lot of things seemed completely illogical so I was always asking the adults around me questions they didn’t have the answers to. I guess I “came out” to my parents a couple years ago, to which there was much uproar. My mom is very religious, so she still sometimes tries to tell me interesting stories about miracles and how wonderful faith is. I listen to her; I appreciate how she tries; and I respect her faith. But I could never see myself being like that. I think once you’ve already developed doubt in god it immediately disables you from ever fully believing again.
I can’t make up my mind on what I do believe in. A part of me hopes that there is some sort of afterlife, that death isn’t the absolute end…except I know in my mind that we are just organic bodies with no meaning or purpose other than to procreate. And yet I believe everything happens for a reason. I believe in reincarnation–the Before Sunrise version of it, at least. It’s that in the beginning there were a number of souls, say a thousand, and as the population grew and grew, these souls split up over and over again and were placed into different people. This explains why you meet people that remind you of others you know–or even yourself. It’s that feeling you get when you meet a “a kindred spirit.”
This is where my confliction lies: I’m too logical to be agnostic but I seek too much meaning to be an atheist. I should just refute my belief in everything outside of my own brain and take on solipsism. That’s the coolest of all beliefs.
Sorry I’ve just put you through reading about my hippy-dippy personal mythology.
Take care and Merry Christmas,
Addelaide
Midnight Impulse 