I’ve been an atheist my entire adult life. Although raised in the Catholic Church, passing all the sacraments up to and including Confirmation in eighth grade – an achievement deeming me an official, Sunday-tithing catholic – I publicly renounced the religion my senior year of high school and never looked back.
This magisterial concept never fit into my chosen lifestyle of sex, drugs and rock n’ roll. I was never going to be the guy who gives it all up to God, puts it in God’s hands, or any of that other cliché, nonsensical gobbledygook that Christians often tout when life takes a tumultuous turn.
In my mind, all of this blind faith crap was nothing short of weakness, to put confidence in some invisible sky wizard and trust that everything, no matter how dire, was going to be okay. Maybe I’m just a control freak, but I wasn’t taking a chance on God.
That said, I’ve experienced some bizarre instances in my life, typically when alone, high and spending time among the vastness of the great outdoors, when I start to consider that I might be wrong about all of this God stuff.
Weed-Inspired Divinity?
Call it a junk epiphany, call it red-eyed dumbassery. But the archetype of this madhouse existence, at times, seems to be too much of a coincidence for there not to be something bigger.
Yep, as embarrassing as it is to admit, weed sometimes makes me question my secular stance in the universe and tries, ever so cleverly, to get me to switch sides. It’s been known to happen while I’m listening to the breeze brush against the trees or in the kitchen analyzing the flavor of pineapple.
None of this could be an accident, I tell myself. It’s like the THC rattling around in my skull rips away at decades of skepticism, forcefully pushing me, no matter how much resistance I dare wage, to get on team Jeebus. And I’m not the only one.
“Existence seems too perfect for it to be accidental, coincidental or only caused by nature,” Matthew, a 33-year-old from Norfolk, Virginia, told The Bluntness.
“Earth is the perfect distance from the sun. The moon is the perfect distance from earth. The oceans had to be the perfect temperature and pH for life to occur and survive. Throughout evolution life and intelligent life had to have near perfect conditions to live and evolve. When one combines the probability of all this it would seem improbable, but yet, here we are. Seems to be intelligently designed to me.”
Amen!
However, science tells us there’s a damn good explanation for this perfect storm. The Big Bang, the dispersion of dust and gas, microorganisms, hydrogen and a lot of luck. Unfortunately, none of it, regardless of how convincing the research might be, discounts a higher power. At least that’s what my high brain says.
If science is the explanation of some grand design, then who pray tell is the engineer? And if it’s this God feller that the Bible speaks so highly of, was he or she a Republican? Why else would they be so uptight about masturbation, homosexuality, abortion and the consumption of intoxicating beverages?
Why would an all-powerful being put so much of an emphasis on such trivialities when, like, their creation keeps creeping toward doom and destruction? And if living life on the straight and narrow was so crucial to securing a spot in “heaven,” why did we want it anyway?
Come on, God must be a joke. There’s no way that a being with the ability to whip up a world and everything in it would concern itself with butt sex and Budweiser. So once again, as quickly as my marijuana-infused mind started to consider that maybe, just maybe there was a higher power, I was back to where I started – a full blown atheist.
If God exists, though, the cannabis plant may have been put on Earth for droves of nonbelievers, just like me, to stumble onto on their own time, invoking some sort of wild spiritual awakening that ensures that we won’t end up rotting in hell once we croak.
Maybe considering the possibility that God is at the wheel was a side effect to getting high and all one had to do to be saved and ushered into paradise was to embrace it rather than order Taco Bell.
Question Everything
We must always question the existence of God, but by that logic we should also consider the possibility that one exists. We should question everything. We may even want to question our sanity.
Although weed can make one examine the meaning of life, it also makes dolts of otherwise intelligent people. “I've thought about God being real,” reports Stephen, a 42-year-old from Glasford, Illinois. “I’ve also tried to unlock my apartment door with my car key remote.”
Yes, sometimes I ponder the mysteries of life when I’m high. Where was I destined to go once my body got too old to keep kicking, succumbed to cancer or can’t recuperate after being hit by a city bus? Would I be doomed to eternal darkness, or pop out on the other side somewhere warm with an open bar, great music and beautiful women? If the latter was the case, take me now. Consider me saved, Jeebus. Next round’s on me!
But then I stop to consider that perhaps the weed isn’t strengthening my spiritual goo, lending wisdom to prevent me from missing any signs from above before the death ship swoops down and straps me to the back of it. Maybe it was actually killing brain cells, making it easier for me to drink the Kool-Aid, dumbing me down further to ensure that I would end up on a slab, just as clueless about what’s next than the rest of you bastards.
Maybe there’s a God, maybe there isn’t. Perhaps this is all a simulation. Or maybe it’s just the aliens playing with their ant farm until they get bored and squash it. We should, however, keep on enjoying those things that inspire us in life while we still can. Of course, let’s keep asking questions too. You never know when something might answer. It might only be a Taco Bell employee repeating your order back at the drive thru, but sometimes that is about as spiritual as it gets.
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