I was brought up to believe in God, my parents dragged me to church when I was little, I had to say prayers before I went to sleep - Now I lay me down to sleep...
At school we always had prayers in the morning and had to say grace at lunchtime.
In infants and juniors we had to put our chairs on the top of our desks and say a prayer at the end of the school day.
In my heart I never really believed it but not taking any chances that I might be wrong about it, always said them with my eyes shut anyway.
I even muttered a few prayers in my early life after school when I thought something bad was about to happen to me.
But the more I learned free from religion, the more I couldn't square my new 'scientific' knowledge with that of 'blind faith' in nonsensical stories written a thousand or more years ago when times were clearly different and what people knew other than the churches teachings all but non existent.
Now I know if I simply look up into the night's sky, every thing we can see bar one with our eyes is from our galaxy, a galaxy that consists of more stars than we can count in our lifetime of simply just counting numbers from the time we could speak to our dying breath - at least 200 billion of them.
Similarly there are at least 200 billion planets in our galaxy (The Milky Way) too.
If you (or more likely your God) could be omnipresent at all these places at once he (or she) would not only have to spread themselves across all these Sun's and planets but be able to be in places that stretch about 150 thousand light years across from each other too.
There is also one thing we can see with our eyes that isn't from our galaxy. We can just about make out the light coming from our nearest neighbouring galaxy Andromeda.
That galaxy is even bigger than our own.
It is a huge distance away too.
To give you an example of how far away it is, the light reaching us now from it would have to have set off two and a half million years ago - that is about the dawn of man on earth and long before branches of mankind such as Neanderthals, or Burnley fans had even evolved.
Even that is nothing when you consider the universe in which we live has absolutely billions of galaxy's other than our own and Andromeda and they have each millions of stars and millions of planets in them.
The size of the universe is over 90 billion light years across and is nearly 14 billion years old.
So if there is a creator do you really think we on piddly little earth are his most cherished possessions that he watches over all of the time?
I don't.
There is no thing as the creator (who created him if there was?) and if you think about it a bit, even concepts like why must there even have been a 'beginning' to the universe - energy can't be created or destroyed - so maybe it is and always has been eternal and was always in being and will never cease?
That perhaps is going a bit to far for now, so do you believe in God, are people who follow a religion blindly simply being 'controlled' by their spiritual leaders?
Is religion a blessing or a curse?
Should we bin religion now for the betterment of the world?
What do you think?
At school we always had prayers in the morning and had to say grace at lunchtime.
In infants and juniors we had to put our chairs on the top of our desks and say a prayer at the end of the school day.
In my heart I never really believed it but not taking any chances that I might be wrong about it, always said them with my eyes shut anyway.
I even muttered a few prayers in my early life after school when I thought something bad was about to happen to me.
But the more I learned free from religion, the more I couldn't square my new 'scientific' knowledge with that of 'blind faith' in nonsensical stories written a thousand or more years ago when times were clearly different and what people knew other than the churches teachings all but non existent.
Now I know if I simply look up into the night's sky, every thing we can see bar one with our eyes is from our galaxy, a galaxy that consists of more stars than we can count in our lifetime of simply just counting numbers from the time we could speak to our dying breath - at least 200 billion of them.
Similarly there are at least 200 billion planets in our galaxy (The Milky Way) too.
If you (or more likely your God) could be omnipresent at all these places at once he (or she) would not only have to spread themselves across all these Sun's and planets but be able to be in places that stretch about 150 thousand light years across from each other too.
There is also one thing we can see with our eyes that isn't from our galaxy. We can just about make out the light coming from our nearest neighbouring galaxy Andromeda.
That galaxy is even bigger than our own.
It is a huge distance away too.
To give you an example of how far away it is, the light reaching us now from it would have to have set off two and a half million years ago - that is about the dawn of man on earth and long before branches of mankind such as Neanderthals, or Burnley fans had even evolved.
Even that is nothing when you consider the universe in which we live has absolutely billions of galaxy's other than our own and Andromeda and they have each millions of stars and millions of planets in them.
The size of the universe is over 90 billion light years across and is nearly 14 billion years old.
So if there is a creator do you really think we on piddly little earth are his most cherished possessions that he watches over all of the time?
I don't.
There is no thing as the creator (who created him if there was?) and if you think about it a bit, even concepts like why must there even have been a 'beginning' to the universe - energy can't be created or destroyed - so maybe it is and always has been eternal and was always in being and will never cease?
That perhaps is going a bit to far for now, so do you believe in God, are people who follow a religion blindly simply being 'controlled' by their spiritual leaders?
Is religion a blessing or a curse?
Should we bin religion now for the betterment of the world?
What do you think?