My "This I Believe"

I believe in the absence of God. I believe in the irrelevance of God. I believe in the liberation that flows only from the death of God. For years I was bound with ties manufactured from ancient mythology of the divine that labored to survive in the harsh light of cold reason. Questions flooded in my young mind. Jesus loved. Jesus was loved. Jesus died. God loved. God killed Jesus because God loved me. Sacrifice. Somehow human nature throughout many generations concocted a story from the ideas that our hearts require to maintain hope.

Love. Death. Sacrifice. From one story, billions of human beings find the formula that wills their souls to continue. From this story, hope has sprung, a culture is born, politics finds a well of power that will never go dry, and rules are crafted in stone.

I believe in breaking free of the myths that were once a bulwark for my very existence. I crave what every human soul craves. I crave love. I crave an explanation for death. I crave the subject that will inspire a passion for me to sacrifice. Now I have come to crave freedom. The freedom not to conform. The freedom of sexuality. The freedom of creativity. This freedom comes with responsibility and the knowledge that there is no heaven or hell. There is no afterlife. There are no second chances. The moment I began to truly believe this, my soul transformed. I baptized myself in truth, and reason flooded into the pores of my soul. From it came a jubilation tinged with sadness and separation from the people I would be leaving behind.

I believe now that I am free to believe. I see lives in the present. I see beauty in its current form. I feel emotions as they are. I love as I am able now. I have concocted my own meaning without mythology. I have found hope from the ties of experience and will. They thrive under the fire of logic and reason. They are beautiful because they are mine.