Emotional Beings

You might be asking yourself if I believe in God or not. I would consider myself to be agnostic. I think in order to believe or not believe in something, it requires some sort of evidence. Otherwise, it’s just wishful thinking.

Why would humans have such desires? I think it comes down to us being emotional beings. We tend to seek comfort and avoid suffering—I don’t want to experience pain; I want to experience joy. Naturally, that desire may also influence what we want to believe in. I’ve heard the argument, “There has to be a God—just look at all the beauty in the world.” Again, we have an emotional desire to look for positivity. Positive equals good; negative equals bad.

I remember someone playing a video game once and saying something like, “How cool is that sky? Imagine if our sky looked like that.” To which I replied, “We would just think it’s normal, and we’d probably think our actual sky was the cool one.”

Consider a more extreme picture: imagine being held prisoner your entire life, where someone else controls every detail—when you eat, what you eat, even when you get to breathe. Now imagine they are restricting your breathing, but every so often, they let you catch your breath. You might feel extremely grateful to them. You might even see those brief moments as “beauty” in the world. I’m not saying we have it bad—like I said, it’s an extreme example—but it shows how much our perspective depends on what we’re being exposed to. It ultimately comes down to what we are familiar with and the fact that we have nothing else to compare it to.

I think we can all agree that our emotions can sometimes be misleading, but we probably wouldn’t be here without them. They’re an integral part of our survival.