This I believe

Before I first arrived in the America, I had never given any serious thoughts to the term religion. To most Chinese people, religion is a vague remotely relevant to their everyday lives, and gods are worshipped only when they are needed, usually during times of hardship. In the America, my most shocking realization was that inside the hearts of an overwhelming number of people, there was something called God. Moreover, what God says in a normal-looking book serves as their moral foundation. As one can imagine, I was soon forced to find my own place in this highly religious—and diverse—society.

Never having believed in a god of any form, I became an even stronger atheist here in the America. I never understood the contradictions and conflicts between various religions. How could the universe be both monotheistic and polytheistic? How could the same world be created both by God saying “Let there be light” and by Pan Gu, the creator of universe in Chinese folk religion, with a gigantic ax? If gods indeed exist for everyone on earth, why does the Chinese gods look Chinese, Hindu gods look Hindu, and the Christian God look Jewish? Why does the evil so often prevail, while the good suffers tragic ends? Nothing made sense, so I turned to science.

Darwin’s theory of evolution practically tells us that we are products of randomness, just like mushrooms and flies. Our ancestors mixed and matched with one another, and the strongest remained, evolving into who we are today. I was first stunned by such a dreadful revelation and saddened by the same notion that saddened Max Weber—that there is no meaning to life. But soon I remembered the words of Sherlock Holmes: “once you have discounted the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” To me, the “impossible” is this collective term religion, and thus I am left to deal with the distressing Darwinian theory.

And I learned to deal with it. I learned to be fine with the idea that the Homo sapiens not only evolve the same way as the cockroaches do, but also are as insignificant as the cockroaches are. Really, it’s fine—there’s no one noble cause to our existence, that no one has ever bothered to draw up some kind of master plan for us, for me. What troubled me was, however, if there was indeed no meaning to life, to our continuous reproduction, to the entire universe, then how do we live? How can I still be happy, and sad, about the things around me? What keeps my life going, knowing the end will be invariably nothingness?

Luckily, it did not take long for me to find my answer. What I learned about the existentialist philosophy, in a way, filled the vacant holes in my belief about the world around me. Existentialists believe in decision-making and dealing with the consequences of those decisions. They believe that the choices we make determine who we are and what we worth. Although this particular idea does sound clichéd nowadays, it was nonetheless a “Eureka” moment for me. So we make meaning. Our decisions give meaning to our lives and shape who we are. It’s nice to know that although our lives have no meaning, we can still have a goal—to make, and continue to make, good decisions. But again, “making meaning” from decision-making is an incredibly abstract idea. For what do we make our decisions? What do our morals serve?

To find the answer, I revisited my memory and I remembered how my grandparents used to tell me that when I grow up, I will be responsible to support my family, which gave me food, shelter, love, and life. And so I became a believer in nature. I believe that the only reason we are here today is that nature has provided us with a rare environment that allows for life. I believe that the doomsday will not be brought about by God but by nature, just like how it brought about our birth. I believe that if we want to continue to make meaning for our lives, we must first serve the nature, and not the other way around.