 Here on my channel, Nate is lame. I want to make everyone comfortable. Sit down, have a nice cup of tea, get warmed by the fire, wrap up in a blanket, chill out. Are you relaxed? Are you at home? Nice. On that note, let's talk about religion. Um, this is a really dangerous, uh, impersonal topic. People get crazy up in arms about this. And honestly, if you're not able to open up your mind and explore new topics and hear new points of view on things, this video isn't for you. It's so stupid that I have to take time to explain this, but the only way that I can change your mind is if you agree with me. That's it. I can't reach out through your computer screen and change your mind by, like, I don't know, doing some Jedi magic or something like that. This is not an attack on your personal access to free thought. And if your sense of sentience is threatened by strangers on the internet, what are you, is this your first time on the internet? How have you lasted this long? You're, like, seven years old? Seriously, grow up. Too long, didn't read. This video is gonna contain some opinions that you may or may not agree with. That's cool. I can't change your mind. Only you can. These are just opinions, and besides, you're the one who clicked on this anyway. There's a seed of curiosity in your heart, and hopefully you're not just here to hear your own personal opinions were gargitated back onto your face. I mean, if that's what you're expecting, you're saying yourself up for disappointment more than likely. Did we do it? Did we idiot-proof this video? I'm running out of duct tape to pad this thing out with extra feelings protective wrap over here. Name is Lane. Do you believe in God? Uh, no. But, but, but why not? Well, science and logic and stuff. What? Do you hate God? Do you hate Christians? Do you hate Christmas? What's stopping you from committing murder and rape and genocide? Wow, hypothetical person. You're drawing a whole lot of conclusions from my answer. Here, let me just walk you through my reasoning and why I view this subject this way. So first things first, um, I am not ignorant to religion. I know a thing or two about Christianity, Mormonism, Buddhism, Islam, and a few others. The one that I know the most about is Christianity, since I was born and raised Nazarene, and I have some fantastic memories of making friends and going to church as a kid. I was taught well, and I was taught thoroughly. I met with a discipleship group, like every week I read my Bible, I went to Christian concerts. I, I did the works, okay? But then what happened? Did you watch the love of your life die from cancer and curse God, or were you affected by some other tragedy that caused you to turn your back on your Heavenly Father? Uh, no, that's, that's not really what happened. When I was about 14 or 15, I spent some time on YouTube exploring contrary thoughts to my own. That's a practice I think more people should do more often. Check my Twitter. As much as I hate Donald Trump, I still follow the dude so I can stay updated. Watching channels like Mr. Repsion, The Amazing Atheist, Jacqueline Glenn, and Dark Matter 2525, I had this idea that if religion was the legit deal, it'd be able to hold up to criticism. Well, suffice to say in my eyes, it didn't really hold up. Suddenly, I came to realize that something that had been such a huge part of my life was completely false and untrue, and that kind of made me scared and unsure about myself, and as a result, I became a hardcore edgelord. All religious people are blind fools, Christians are ruining society, and they should be exiled. Anyone who believes in a deity is inferior to my grand 15-year-old atheist brain. Ignostics are just cowards who can't take the plunge and denialism. Fight Club and Tyler Durden hail Satan because nothing else matters. I was the absolute worst kind of atheist, and I was super obnoxious back in the day. I felt like I was climbing out of something that nobody else in my family was able to leave, and it made me feel smarter. It made me feel like I knew something that they didn't, which led to this crazy superiority complex. As a result, I was a jerk. And to be honest, I was a better person when I was Christian. While I was a piece of trash at the time, my mind still hasn't changed on the inherent fallacies in the concept of God. Logically, a lot of it just doesn't make sense to me. Scientifically, it's a little crazy, and it doesn't hold a lot of weight. Let me go into more detail on where I'm coming from. Yeah, so this is important for me to once again remind you that I can't change your mind unless you agree with me. Are you still watching? Are you mad? If you're mad, please click off. I don't want to hear about it in the comments. So let's just establish a concept, okay? Most religious people agree that God is all-powerful, but he's also all-good. Are we good? Can we all agree on that? Sweet. So if God is all-powerful, that means that he's low-key responsible for everything, including evil, including death, including cancer and rape and the Holocaust and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, nothing gets past an omnipotent being without them putting it there. And if something happens that they didn't control 100%, they're not omnipotent. Okay, let me use the example of Super Mario Maker. You can do pretty much anything in that game, but you can't give Mario a gun and you can't have him shoot goombas in the head and scoop out their eyeballs and their mushy skulls. That's because the programmers didn't allow that possibility to be included. Just as humans have free will, its only limits are what God could allow us to do, same with Mario, where you can do pretty much whatever you want to a certain extent as much as the programmers allow. So now we're kind of stuck with the gesture that God is literally responsible for everything evil and bad with the universe and the world since he is omnipotent. Thus, he's not completely good or wholesome. That's kind of a conundrum and it goes against a lot of what these religions are saying. That's not making a lot of sense and it provides a shaky foundation for the rest of their teachings and implications about creation and the meaning of life. If they can't even get their protagonist down, how is anyone supposed to take the rest of the plot seriously? Okay, but Nate, God works in mysterious ways. Bad must exist for there to be good. God is not responsible for our actions. We have free will and the right to make our own decisions. Yeah, okay, I hear that rebuttal a lot and it frustrates me when people apply human characteristics to God when it's convenient but they pull the only God can understand God card when they're about to lose an argument. God seemed to go out of their way to demonstrate their powers to humans in crazy ways and stories but they can never be bothered to explain tangibly what their moral stances and reasoning are. It just kind of seems like lazy writing to me than the works of an actual God, you know? Or maybe a corrupt politician at the time, it's all up in there. Plus the gesture that good and evil must coexist is kind of dumb to me. Do you know who would technically be responsible for that rule? God. Nothing gets past him. If he's all powerful, he can totally make a concept of good without baby murder and AIDS messing everything up. Plus, why is free will inherently the only way that God can make meaning out of his creations? Since he's gotten stuff, can he just push a button and take away our free will and still manage to squeeze meaning out of everything? If God's omnipotent, why can't he just snap his fingers and make everything good, period? Okay, Nate, you're not making a whole lot of sense right now. You know what? You're right. None of this makes any sense because the concept of omnipotence is so insane and crazy to begin with. When you try to make omnipotence fit into a moral rule set, it significantly makes less and less sense the more you start babbling like a crazy person trying to describe it. Just like me. Scientifically, the concept of religion doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me either. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that they're incompatible. Okay, but Nate, science and religion can coexist. Religion can be supported by science. I actually fundamentally 100% disagree with that. Alright, let's you and me take a step back to middle school, okay? Let's review the scientific method. You make an observation, develop a hypothesis, develop an experiment, conduct set experiment, gather evidence, analyze evidence, repeat the experiment, publish results for peers to observe and recreate. It's tried, it's true, and it's the basis of all factual knowledge that we have about the world. Scientists do not come to conclusions and pick around evidence to support themselves. They keep an open mind and change assertions with evidence. That is not how religious science works. What I find unfortunate is that a lot of religious scientists and groups start off with a conclusion, and that conclusion isn't God is real. Then they work their way backwards through the method trying to get together proof. That is not how science is practiced. That's mainly because we've never found evidence strictly pointing to there being a conscious God. Okay, but Nate, how about the things that we can't explain? You know, I saw this one video on Facebook that said that there's like a one and one quadrillion billion chance for life to happen. So who's the one who needs to depend on faith now, huh? Well, I do hear what you're saying, and unfortunately that's kind of a logical fallacy. That's called the God of the Gaps fallacy. We don't know something, therefore, God. That's not logical at all. We can put anything in its place. Instead of saying God, we can have a flying spaghetti monster or a space dolphin or Steve Jobs ghost. Not having an answer doesn't imply another answer. Plus, having an answer doesn't make you right in the first place. So Nate, can we twist this around on you and say that science isn't always right and it can make mistakes too? Oh dude, absolutely. Scientists are wrong all the time. But the cool thing is, science adapts with new information. If something doesn't fit into the ground natural puzzle scheme, the entire thing is uprooted and redone. That's flexibility that virtually no religions have, and that's why I trust science a lot more than religion. Man, Nate, it sounds like you really hate religion. Well, actually I don't. I think it's a wonderful thing that should be celebrated and fostered in many people. Wait, what? Well, something happened to me on August 8th, 2016. It was the morning after warp tour and I was waking up home alone, and I was like, huh, what is death like? So I googled it. I read article after article describing it from a scientific perspective, and it set me off. I panicked and I freaked out. Eternal, unending, unstopping nothingness for the rest of time and space and beyond. It's not blackness because there's no color at all. There's no sound because you don't have ears to listen with. There are no thoughts because there's no you to think them. There's no anything forever. Close your eyes for a split second. That's how long eternity feels when you're dead. You return to the void that you inhabited years before you were born. That nothingness. To call it nothingness feels weird because that implies that there's a comparative somethingness to contrast it to. There's not. It's nonexistence and no return from it. That was scary. And the fact that I could do nothing about it happening to me and the people I cared for freaked me out inconsolably. Basically, I was in the midst of a six month long panic attack. I couldn't focus at concerts or in school, and the dumbest things would set me off. For example, in history class we would read about all these famous people who had died and I would just be thinking about how they're an oblivion for all of eternity and I'd start to panic. Or we'd be driving in a car and I'd see someone speeding. And I'd think, oh well he's in a hurry because time is important to him. And as time is running out and he wants to get from point A to point B without cutting his lifespan anymore, I'd panic. Little things like that just added up. It sucked. My existential crisis was the worst thing that I've ever been through. I wouldn't even wish that upon my worst enemy. Nothing can match the raw terror I felt nonstop for those months and it never went away. That was the kind of thing that could possibly drive some people to suicide. The weight of my own mortality and human condition was too much to bear and I had no God turned to in my head. So that's when I realized two things. Number one, nihilism is the ultimate release from worries and concern. It became my new religion in which I was free to do anything I pleased and since I'm not going to exist in the near future like who cares anyway. Number two, what I experienced was unimaginable trauma. Nobody else should go through it and that's probably why people turned to religion. I understand why people are religious. There is an existential need for purpose and reassurance as well as community and enlightenment. Religion does all of those things for billions of people around the world who can't find it and concepts like nothingness for me. And that is totally okay. That does not make them dumb. That does not make me smarter than anybody else. It can be argued that I am just as delusional for disregarding my own mortality and submitting to the void of nothingness as someone who could be worshiping a God. We all have this cosmic need for something and if we don't get it we crack under our own weight like I did when I was 16. I support and I encourage your right to practice religion because honest to God I wish that I could believe in one too. Unfortunately I can't and there's not a whole lot that anyone can do to convince me otherwise without having like raw evidence in their hands. And trust me that makes me really sad. I've since outgrown all these old atheist YouTube channels since I don't really get mega positive vibes from them and their political views kind of drive me up walls sometimes. But that doesn't mean that I don't owe a lot to them for providing me with a very simple basis for my understanding of myself and the universe around me. As long as you keep your religion out of politics and don't force it upon children who aren't old enough to think for themselves I am in full favor of religion and I think it's an excellent personal tool for many people to find comfort in meaning it. And that's awesome. Really I could talk about this for hours but I think this is an appropriate time to like come to a conclusion and just feel free to pick up where I left off in the comments. It's gonna be brutal and bloody down there. Please be warned. Religious or not as long as you find purpose and be a good noodle I am in full favor of whatever you want to believe. You're welcome on my YouTube channel regardless of whatever religion you're part of. If you feel the need go for it. You can pray for me. I used to be Christian. I know there's a lot of love and thought that goes into a gesture like that. Don't be a jerk, do cool stuff and try to make your existence as awesome as you can. Whether or not you're judged at the end of your life both scenarios are more the reason to make other people happy and make your own goals come true. Peace, love, dead musicians, stay spicy.