Reality Check

The other day, I was in the Dining Commons, and I sat next to a guy I didn't know, a senior majoring in Math. With me, I had some reading for my History class, a book called Sport and Recreation in Ancient Greece. When I explained my assignment to the senior, he scoffed and said, "The Greeks were so weird. They just made up their gods." And gosh dang it, I was almost OFFENDED.

This guy was so CERTAIN that his God is the "right" God. I've never been that way, and I've always tried to keep an open mind about religion, so I tried to make him understand that not everyone believes what he does. At this point, he patronizingly asked me if he could help me with anything, as if I needed fixing because I was asking him not to criticize an ancient culture; he asked if he could pray for me as if some part of my soul needed cleansing because NO ONE IS ALLOWED TO QUESTION GOD, NOT EVER.

This has little, if anything, to do with fairy tales, but something about this conversation combined with today's class made me assess my own beliefs, and I believe that there's a possibility--even if it's very, very small--that religion, and maybe even reality itself, is a purely human construct. I do not believe that reality is concrete but, rather, that it has been divided up into little sections of clay and distributed out to each and every one of us and that our beliefs are the hands that are used to mold that clay to our liking. Of course, sometimes, the clay of reality gets stuck on Belief's hands, and reality affects beliefs instead of the other way around.

For example, there is a brick wall. You, me, and everybody else knows it's a brick wall. Except for one man. This man believes it's a concrete wall, and because he believes that, he walks along that wall thinking, "What a nice concrete wall," because that is his reality being affected by his beliefs. However, if he touches the wall, reality will affect his beliefs because he will see that the wall is, in fact, a brick wall. Surprise!

I believe that religion is much the same way. God is real to us because we believe in Him, but the Greek gods were very real to them, too. I don't think there's a reason to be so gosh darn patronizing about it. I don't think we have a right to say their gods are fake. After all, our belief in our God is the only proof we have that he exists. What if there are alternate realities that we go to after we die based on our religious beliefs? What if all of the gods ever are real and simply exist on different planes? We have absolutely no way of knowing.

I wish I could tell the whole world to keep their hands out of other people's clay, and again, I don't know what part of today's class made me think about all of this.

I guess, if you think about it, it has to do with fairy tales because fairy tales are real if you believe them? If you believe there's a Prince or Princess Charming out there for you, there probably is, and then the fairy tale would be real, so... I don't know.

Or maybe it was something about how we can't be too certain about anything. Just like we can't say for certain that there aren't alternate realities after we die because none of us have actually died yet.

I probably exceeded the blog word limit by a whole bunch, but I needed to say this because it's been on my mind for over a year now, and it's certainly something to think about.