Underneath my Buddhist veneer is an agnostic. For as far back in time as I can recall, I was made to worship the venerable Buddha and was taught the Buddhist metaphysics. Like Buddha said, I should not believe blindly, not least utterly succumbing to any particular ideology, which includes Buddhism itself. The more I read, the more I doubt the existence of God. But I can never be sure, and thus shall never be bias. Instead of turning atheistic, I take the position of an agnostic instead.
When I was still small, I was afraid of darkness. At night, in my comforter, I could listen to repeating tapping sounds coming from the dark corner. I could see the big dark swaying figure outside the window, and as the lightning brightened up the sky for split-seconds, the silhouette became even more apparent and sharply defined. Thought of ghosts came to my mind and frightened the daylights out of me. Apparently that tapping sound came from the malfunctioned washing machine, and the swaying figure was a big coat hanging outside my window. I then realized the ghosts and all had existed only in my mind. I can imagine the same thing happening to the ignorant people of the past. Gradually, such fear of supernatural beings evolved into religions.
For my entire life, I grow to doubt even more the existence of God, but never entirely, for the reason mentioned earlier: there is no absolute truth. One of my reasoning is as follows. Every religion claims that there is one and only one God in this universe, yet that God differs vastly from one religion to another. If the former premise is true, then there can never be different Gods, and vice-versa. Either way, the very foundation where these religions are built upon has collapsed by this simple reasoning. Despite their moralistic principles, the entire faith construct is mere myth and nothing more.
Saying that God does not necessarily exist may cause fundamentalists to take umbrage. They believe in their religion so firmly that it becomes their own comfortable cocoon. They will do anything and everything to protect their belief, and even coerce others to follow suit. Such a belief, in its extremities, could overwhelm reasoning and override logic. But as a freethinker I have an equal right to believe the opposite, not least when there is no absolute truth.
I say there is no absolute truth because no matter what a religion says about the creator of the universe, it cannot be corroborated. Ergo, unless God appears before our eyes (and not mere fantasy), every notion of a God remains a fallacious claim. There are instances where people claim they have seen Demons and Angels. The public believe it even more when the media propagates it. We have not experienced it ourselves, and yet we blindly concede its veracity. It is possible that under stressful conditions or psychotic medication, the brain hallucinates. As a line from one movie aptly puts it, it (drug) is the only way to fly. We do not know the complete picture (of what happened to that person that made that claim), and thus should not jump abruptly into the conclusion that God exists.
A quote from a famous French philosopher, Rene Descartes, have convinced me even more (though I still take a neutral stand) that absolute truth can not be found, and thus we can never be sure of the existence of God. “Cogito Ergo Sum”, meaning “I think, therefore I am”, simply states that the veracity of every thing in this world can not be determined with certitude (there is a possibility that they are made to deceive us), except for our thoughts. The Matrix trilogy has expressed this viewpoint with utmost clarity. In this trilogy, humans were incarcerated in a prison for their mind while their bodies are exploited as machines’ power source. Blissfully living in a computer simulated world, the humans had no idea that they were being exploited.
Under the mathematical framework that scientists had fastidiously constructed, we came to the conclusion that the universe came into existence after an ultra-massive explosion from a point of singularity that released inconceivable amount of energy. The laws of physics were kick-started, and the space-time continuum came into being. Yet, we have not the slightest idea of what happened before that (because the space-time continuum did not exist before that) and subsequently what started the explosion. As logical and scientific as one person could be, he or she will be tempted to conclude that a superior being was behind of it all. Allow me to present a scenario to counter such uncorroborated conclusion. Assuming that we could travel back time, we give a pre-historic human an electronic board. For the rest of his life, he would never figure out how it worked. Like-wise, we will never understand things of such immense complexity, not least when we do not even have the foundation necessary to comprehend it.
I doubt religion could provide us with the truth, for two reasons. Firstly, like I mentioned, there is no absolute truth (because it cannot be determined with certitude). Secondly, history had taught us of all the blunders that religious people made. The most famous of it all would be the Orthodox Church. Galileo Galilei, the astronomer who discovered that the earth revolved around the Sun, was punished for dissenting from the Orthodoxy. While such ignorance seemed to pose no danger (if only you did not publicly express your heresies), it became alarming when they use science to corroborate their stance. Fundamentalists often misconstrue the contents of the holy manuscripts to reflect its concordance with scientific evidence. It does not come across to me as serendipitous discoveries, but rather as misguided interpretation which is heavily biased.
Ultimately, the point of it all is not that God does not exist, but that there is no absolute truth. The fact that people clinging on to pluralistic view of this world, either consciously or unconsciously, is evident enough that religion is not the ultimate truth; but rather a belief that comforts our fragile heart amidst seas of uncertainties.