As I said in my first post, one of the things I was hoping to do on my gap year was decide whether I thought there was a God.
I've been an agnostic for a year. For a long time I was a Christian, this was partly because I spent the majority of my secondary education in a catholic school where most people were christians, and so I therefore didn't give a second thought to my religious beliefs. However, when I left at sixth form to go to a grammar school, I started hanging around with Christians and atheists and the atheists led me to question whether indeed there really was a God. This in turn led me to realise that I didn't know why I really believed in God.
But when I thought about there being no God and having no God around me, I felt weird. It's a hard feeling to explain but I felt essentially like I wasn't myself and I didn't know who I was, so I had to take the lawyers point of view and say that the case of the existence of God was innocent until proven guilty. This essentially meant that I wouldn't start to make a decision about the existence of God until I started to read literature for and against there being a god. So I didn't start to make my mind up on this issue until I'd done my A-level exams and I was free of school work.
The first book I read and am still reading is "A History of God" by Karen Armstrong. In this book Armstrong puts forward some very good arguments against the existence of God forward and this has led me to think that there probably isn't a god, although I'm trying not to say that I'm an atheist at the moment since it would be wrong to become an atheist on the basis of one piece of literature.
But even when I could start to make an evidence based decision on the existence of God, it still felt very weird for me to feel that there was no god around me, it felt as if not believing in God took a source of my confidence away from me. I felt like I just didn't know what to do, it was as if I'd built my whole life around a God, and taking God away from it felt like taking the bricks out of a house's walls. Furthermore, I feel that despite all the evidence I've so far considered I could still go back to believing in God to return to my normal self even if it meant that I'd be deluding myself. And it would seem that I'm not the only person who feels this way, the other day when I was talking to a friend about the existence of God he said "I don't know how anyone can get by without believing in a god" and my mother doesn't like the idea of there not being a god because she thinks that there would be nothing to look forward to if she didn't believe in God. Research has also shown that most people have a gene which makes them more likely to believe that there is a god.
But why is it that we feel this way? Why is it that some of us feel the need to have a god around us? Why is the idea of there not being a possible heaven at the end of our lives so unappealing?? Surely if anything it would be better because then we'd have no chance of going to hell and suffering??
Do I have this problem because it contradicts the idea of what I've believed for so long, and it's hard to come to terms with that change? Or is it because it's hard for me to contemplate the idea of there not being anyone to share my thoughts with if I don't feel I can say them to the outside world? Or is it because it's hard for me to think of there being no one to help me when I'm in trouble?
I do half wonder if it's my ancestors though, am I genetically adapted to be this way because our ancestors created gods to explain concepts that we can now use science to explain? Was it our ancestors actions that made many of us more likely to want to cling to a god?
Saturday, 30 October 2010
Friday, 29 October 2010
Why I'm blogging
I started this blog because I'm on a gap year and I thought other people, who are considering taking a gap year might want to read it.
So why did I take a gap year?? Before I started thinking about university, I was very anti gap years. I always thought, they were a waste of time and money and I just couldn't see the point in taking one when you could be doing more useful things. What made me change my mind was when I'd done my AS-level exams and I knew my maths exams had gone badly, because I want to be a lawyer and I wanted to be at one of the universities that are in the top 20, and when I began to look at the prospectuses for universities in that category I learnt that they all wanted 3 As for prospective law students, unless they were scottish universities but since I don't want to be a lawyer in Scotland, that just wasn't an option for me. But I knew I'd have to take a gap year, when the maths department wouldn't predict me anything higher than a D.
Although I knew I wasn't going to get anything much in terms of offers from good universities, I applied anyway just to see what I would get. I got an offer from UWE, and that was the only university out of my original options that gave me an offer but I didn't want to go there so I declined eventually it and applied to the University of Hull through UCAS extra. I did this purely as a measure of how good I was but I didn't really want to go there either, I said I'd go there if I failed to get the required grades for the top universities but even when I got A, B, C on results day, I couldn't stand the idea of going there because I knew I could do better. So eventually I sent them an e-mail declining the place. So at the moment I'm finishing off my A-level in Latin and I'm doing some January retakes.
All the same when I realised I might have to take a gap year, I realised that there could be advantages to it and that really how worthwhile it is depends on how worthwhile you make it. One of the first things I thought of doing was of course A-Level Latin, this is useful to me as a prospective lawyer because a lot of legal terms are in Latin, so it'll come in use for my law degree. But I also realised I could gain some useful work experience because before this year the only work experience I had ever done was for one week in a solicitor's office. So currently I'm doing voluntary work for one day a week at the Citizen's Advice Bureau and it's really useful, I'm gaining insight into Employment Law, Criminal Law and other sorts of law. I am however also considering doing some work experience in the courts, because when I visited the courts for a day before going back to school for the last year it was actually quite interesting to see how the judges worked within the boundaries of common law and how they passed decided what sentences to pass for each case.
Nevertheless that doesn't mean there aren't disadvantages to taking gap years in the way I'm taking mine. Because now I'm not on a school timetable it's really hard to motivate myself, I seem to do everything at snail's pace. This is no joke I've sometimes taken two days over homeworks (and these weren't essays) that should have taken a day. This is partly because I wake up at 12:00/13:00 and so I seem to spend half the afternoon having breakfast/lunch. The other disadvatantage is that most of my friends have gone off to university and so as a countryside dweller I don't have many people my age around me.
On this blog I'm going to record what I'm doing on my gap year, how I get on with university offers and how I get on with other aims of my gap year. Because since I'm currently an agnostic, I'd really like to come to a conclusion on whether there is or isn't a God even if in reality we are all agnostics. The other target I've set for myself is to read all the books I've accumulated in my bookshelves but haven't read, so you might find a few book reviews here. You might also find me blogging about the news since I love
current affairs.
So why did I take a gap year?? Before I started thinking about university, I was very anti gap years. I always thought, they were a waste of time and money and I just couldn't see the point in taking one when you could be doing more useful things. What made me change my mind was when I'd done my AS-level exams and I knew my maths exams had gone badly, because I want to be a lawyer and I wanted to be at one of the universities that are in the top 20, and when I began to look at the prospectuses for universities in that category I learnt that they all wanted 3 As for prospective law students, unless they were scottish universities but since I don't want to be a lawyer in Scotland, that just wasn't an option for me. But I knew I'd have to take a gap year, when the maths department wouldn't predict me anything higher than a D.
Although I knew I wasn't going to get anything much in terms of offers from good universities, I applied anyway just to see what I would get. I got an offer from UWE, and that was the only university out of my original options that gave me an offer but I didn't want to go there so I declined eventually it and applied to the University of Hull through UCAS extra. I did this purely as a measure of how good I was but I didn't really want to go there either, I said I'd go there if I failed to get the required grades for the top universities but even when I got A, B, C on results day, I couldn't stand the idea of going there because I knew I could do better. So eventually I sent them an e-mail declining the place. So at the moment I'm finishing off my A-level in Latin and I'm doing some January retakes.
All the same when I realised I might have to take a gap year, I realised that there could be advantages to it and that really how worthwhile it is depends on how worthwhile you make it. One of the first things I thought of doing was of course A-Level Latin, this is useful to me as a prospective lawyer because a lot of legal terms are in Latin, so it'll come in use for my law degree. But I also realised I could gain some useful work experience because before this year the only work experience I had ever done was for one week in a solicitor's office. So currently I'm doing voluntary work for one day a week at the Citizen's Advice Bureau and it's really useful, I'm gaining insight into Employment Law, Criminal Law and other sorts of law. I am however also considering doing some work experience in the courts, because when I visited the courts for a day before going back to school for the last year it was actually quite interesting to see how the judges worked within the boundaries of common law and how they passed decided what sentences to pass for each case.
Nevertheless that doesn't mean there aren't disadvantages to taking gap years in the way I'm taking mine. Because now I'm not on a school timetable it's really hard to motivate myself, I seem to do everything at snail's pace. This is no joke I've sometimes taken two days over homeworks (and these weren't essays) that should have taken a day. This is partly because I wake up at 12:00/13:00 and so I seem to spend half the afternoon having breakfast/lunch. The other disadvatantage is that most of my friends have gone off to university and so as a countryside dweller I don't have many people my age around me.
On this blog I'm going to record what I'm doing on my gap year, how I get on with university offers and how I get on with other aims of my gap year. Because since I'm currently an agnostic, I'd really like to come to a conclusion on whether there is or isn't a God even if in reality we are all agnostics. The other target I've set for myself is to read all the books I've accumulated in my bookshelves but haven't read, so you might find a few book reviews here. You might also find me blogging about the news since I love
current affairs.
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