To Not Believe In God........part 1

I was grading papers. It was pretty painful, so I decided to take a break.

While I was randomly surfing the net, I ran into some sites discussing religion, for those of you who do not already know.......I'm an atheist.

I don't believe in god and pretty much eat everything, beef and pork included.

It wasn't always like that you know, when I was younger I attended many dinners or functions on days when Hindus are supposed to be vegetarian, quite a few times all that was available was non-veg dishes, on those occasions I just had drinks and didn't eat.

I was very religious. In fact that was what caused me to become an atheist.

Irony.

Imagine if I was your usual run of the mill kind of person, someone who was vaguely religious, I would still believe in god.

What happened is pretty simple. I was very religious because I believed without thinking. I trusted whatever I was told regarding Hinduism. Whenever I went to the temple I used to be so damn impressed with what the priest used to chant. That right there is what made me an atheist.

I wanted to understand more about my religion, I wanted to know what the priest was saying, I wanted to really UNDERSTAND. After doing some research, I found out that what they chanted in temples mainly came from the Vedas. I was 19 and very very idealistic. Naive too.

When I read the Vedas, I began to have doubts about Hinduism, my faith was shaken but not gone........but I'm jumping too far ahead in this story.

There are 4 Vedas, The oldest is the Rig Veda which was chants for the big shot priests,the next most important is the Yajur Veda which was for middle management priests and the third ranking one was the Sama Veda which contained chants for the kucing kurap priests. The last Veda is the Atharva Veda which contained magic spells and some miscellaneous stuff.

I didn't know all this at the time, I just knew them as the Vedas, I didn't even know there were 4.

So, I tried looking in every bookstore in the Klang Valley for copies of the Vedas, translated into English of course, coz as you might guess I can't read Sanskrit. I couldn't find anything.

I pestered my mother relentlessly to get her brother in India to buy and send me the Vedas. After 6 months of whining, my mom, totally fed up, got her brother to send me the Vedas in English. That was when I found out there were 4 Vedas, because there were 4 books in total.

What I found in the Vedas was the start of my eventual atheism. When you're at the temple, the prayers in Sanskrit seem impressive, but that's only because you don't really know what they're saying, but once you understand the meaning of it......its pretty hard to be impressed. Once I read the Vedas I felt conned, but I didn't become an atheist because of that. There's more to the story than the Vedas.

To be continued, too tired to go on now......................................