I'm tired

It's been a long long time since i've piggybacked posts, and by all rights, it should never need be done, but the coffee is good and I got too much on the mind.

I went to play frisbee golf with some high school friends today and one thing became strikingly clear. I've lost religion. This isn't that great of a revelation knowing me, but since high school, that has been the largest change in my life. Here were my friends and they were planning their whole night around going to church and i look at them and say "I haven't gone to church since easter... and christmas before that." And all of a sudden I'm proud of it, even though i've turned into that semi-christian bastard of a person that i hated a few years ago because they would do everything that the chirstian holidays of easter and christmas entailed except without the religion. They would give their gifts (which were often more elaborate than actual christians' gifts because to them it was all about giving presents rather than the background and the thought of being with family) without any guilt of just using the occasion to get work off and lavish niceities upon themselves.

But now i've turned into one of these people, and i don't know if i mind. I still go to church on these days, but only take a novelty approach to it, and enjoy the beauty of the ceremonies and just use the time to reminisce about past years, instead of taking any actual religious meaning away from it. My sudden decline in religion is because of these "realizations" in me:

1. That organized religion takes too much power and credit away from the individual. People often say think that christianity and other religions that strongly bank on ideals like fate and destiny are opposites when in fact i believe now that they are almost the same. After the Super Bowl, everyone likes to thank God and their teammates for making it possible, so if they truly believe that they couldn't've done it without God, then doesn't it seem like it was only in God's power to make it happen, and thus only fate for you. I say what's more important is the will in every individual that pushes them through every moment, but is entirely dependent on one's own past experiences and upbringing to make them act a certain way. I'm trying to sound smart, but it's just that it's the small, everyday, humanly actions that eventually prepare us for whatever it is we have to do. Unless there is a case of absolute divine intervention, it's more a factor of one's own actions that make up their greatest accomplishments.

2. Religion probably would've been incorporated into society, even without a uniformed approach. The seven deadly sins and the ten commandments do make sense, and they do work, but when you look at it, they're also stuck in our laws and they're all things that are necessary for a society to work. They seem like the most basic laws that could've been established for a true government to form, and maybe this is why as kids come into college and generally start being those damn liberal freaks, they also start to lose religion slightly more as they rebel from rules and mind sets. Also, the seven deadly sins, maybe be terrible to deal with in the afterlife, but here on earth they're just things that you can try to avoid if you want to live a better, healthier life. It's almost more a practice of common sense than anything revolutionary, just like everything i've just written down.

I kind of just spaced out for that whole thing. It was just a mind flow of what has been going through my head for the past couple years, so don't get offended if i'm totally wrong.