B00A3OGH1O EBOK by Allen Wong Read Free Book Online Page A

most people. It was no longer just about maintaining control over the masses. Religion was a tool used by people in terrible situations to cope with their lives. After this epiphany, I stopped forcing my beliefs onto them and others.
    A study by Frank Sulloway and Michael Shermer had shown that a person’s belief in religion decreased with age until around the age of seventy-five when it shot up again. Because of this strange uptick in religious beliefs after the age of seventy-five, they postulated that a person’s age was not the cause of one’s religious beliefs. Rather, a person’s age strongly correlated with his or her situation, and the situation was what determined a person’s religious beliefs. For example, an elderly woman was more likely to have lost power, status and loved ones at her age. Along with a perceived impeding death, this woman would more likely turn to religion to help her cope.
    Thus, forcing one’s beliefs onto others is not the way to go. You may introduce your ideas and hypotheses to them, but it is ultimately up to them to choose what they believe in. That’s a freedom that everyone is entitled to.
    If I kept pushing my beliefs onto others, then I would be no better than the religious people who did the same. My mother had been through a rough life. And if religion helped her recover from that life, then I should not stop her from believing in it.
    After I learned to ignore my ego, I decided that being an agnostic was more fitting of my philosophy. An agnostic is a person who believes that it is impossible to know of the existence or nature of God or of anything beyond material phenomena. The atheists I know are actively against those who believe in a God or believe in spiritualism. You see them on internet message boards all of the time. If there’s a YouTube video that deals with something even remotely religious, you will see a debate between atheists and religious people. It would be nice to see a healthy debate on the issue so that we could further each other’s knowledge. But, this was not what I was seeing. What I saw were two bickering sides that wouldn’t budge on their beliefs. The net outcome was just anger and hatred on both sides as well as strained relations.
    That is why I am taking the stance that I don’t know whether there is a God or not. If clear scientific evidence presents itself for either side, then I am ready to embrace it and further my knowledge. But in the meantime, I will not claim superiority in knowing something that I do not actually have proof of. And if given the choice, I would rather not even talk about religion to people, because I do not want to spend my free time talking about such divisive things. I rather focus on bringing people together rather than dividing them.
    Instead of arguing about religion, we should focus on furthering one’s knowledge of the world every day and on helping the people around the world suffer less. And if your religion covers those two basic philosophies, then we’re already on the same page. And if more of us weeded out the details of our religions, we would probably realize that the religions we follow mostly have the same running theme of self-enlightenment, and helping the less fortunate. And then hopefully, we’ll realize that we’re all human beings under the same Sun with roughly the same goals. We just so happen to be slightly different from each other.
    But realistically, peaceful coexistence will probably never exist. Different personalities lead to differing opinions. So, what may seem great to you may not seem so great to someone else. This is why it is important to keep an open-mind about everyone’s opinions.
     
    Lifehack #11: Embrace your haters.
    Behind every successful person, there lies someone who hates him for being successful or hates what he does.
    I had haters even early on in my life. One of those haters ripped my name tag off of an artwork that I spent months drawing. It was so well drawn