My Golden Compass

I am not a believer of the Christian god. I used to be. I used to be for a pretty long time, more or less over a decade or so. In that time, I was happy that my happiness depended solely on my doing good things so I wouldn't burn in hell, and that was sufficient enough for me. Nowadays, I realize that my morality did not come so much from the bible, but from the way my parents raised me. Yes, my parents are Christian, but they rarely ever related any morality to the Christian way of thinking. For them, it was always "this is right" and "this is wrong". It was never "Jesus said this was wrong" or "Jesus said this was right".

That may be why, after I had come to terms with my doubts about religion once and for all in my early twenties, it was easy for me to accept that morality comes not from some sky-being, but from inherent values people are born with. I think the best morality lesson came from my public school education from the start of it, when my kindergarten teacher informed me of the "Golden Rule". If you don't know the Golden Rule by now, you should probably go ahead and kill yourself. Then again, you've probably been a practitioner of it for quite some time now, without even realizing it. So, okay, you can live since you are now aware that what you are doing is all part of the "Golden Rule" business. I've heard and read about people who claim you can't have morality without God. I think the Golden Rule sufficiently debunks this claim.

Now, I'm really not here to debate religion with anyone, even myself. I only talk about the Golden Rule because it's my whole take on morality, and my two cents are worth something. Specifically, two cents. I think that the world would be a better place if people would stop claiming a divine intervention in their actions and took responsibility for their own actions. It's what makes the most sense to me. Granted, I'm far from the most logical person on the planet, but I like to think that my reasoning ability is ever growing, and so at the very least, I'll have my moments of sound reasoning.

In the end, I try to be good to people in the hopes that they will be good to me in return. If they are not good to me, well, I live in the comfort that I was good to them, and sometimes that's more than enough for me.