Beliefs

A close friend of mine asked me on Easter what I believed in (or something amounting to that). I answered as best I could, but decided I could probably work my thoughts out better by writing something up, so here we go.

The first thing I said was that I do not believe in God, but my beliefs turned out to be something like it. I believe in the universe; in fate; in destiny. I like to think my actions are a result of my own cognition and not a tapestry woven long before I was born, but that image is a very powerful one. And despite it being contrary to what I would like to believe, life is indeed a tapestry.

 
Each life is a thread, running along its own path, twisting and intertwining with other lives, other threads. Where some threads end, others begin in ever growing complexity. By having lived, my life has effected another hundred; another thousand. By others' lives, my thread has changed direction and found a new home in the ultimate masterpiece of life.
 
To return to my core belief, I believe in the universe. More specifically, in the power of the universe. Nearly every day, I read articles about space. I read about black holes, colliding galaxies, asteroids. I realise that the universe has hundreds of thousands of ways of wiping out life. I also realise that our continued existence is not due to our ability to adapt. If an asteroid decided to hit Earth today, there's nothing we can do to stop it.
 
That's why I believe in the power of the universe. Despite the ways we could die fiery deaths, we still yet live. I believe that's because either we interest the universe (assuming the universe possesses anything resembling consciousness as we know it) or because the universe can't be bothered with wiping out such a parasite as life. I hope for the former over the latter, because that means we can communicate with the universe in some way. At any rate, against all odds, we survive. We eke out an existence in our small corner of our galaxy, affecting nothing but our own planet. That, in itself, is miraculous.
 
However, even if we interest the universe, I also believe we weren't created deliberately. No higher power created us in its image. We were simply the next step in this evolutionary chain. There could've been hundreds of branches life could've taken, and we were simply lucky it took the turn to get us where we are today. We could've all been hyper-intelligent dinosaur people, but instead we are closer to apes than avians.
 
So, while I don't call my god God, or worship it for my continued existence, it could be argued that I do believe in god. It would be different than any god you can picture, but that really doesn't matter, since even in Christianity, God is supposed to be unknowable - which would be exemplified by the inability to picture It.
 
Though now that I type it out, I like the tapestry imagery I laid out. It could be expanded to incorporate the Many Worlds Theory, since that Interpretation lends itself well to a woven tapestry. However, that's a digression that I deem inappropriate for the purposes of this diversion. Maybe I'll expound on that digression in a future post, but I cannot say for certain - Universe knows I didn't intend to write this out before I started writing it xD