Logan Mize Installment #1

Logan Mize 

A&P 

Final Blog Post

What I am going to be talking about in my final report is peoples fear of questioning. It seems that people, throughout history, have been stripped of their curiosity generation after generation. Even I, as a child, was always told to not question my beliefs, but go through life with faith that what I was taught was the truth. There are many different things keep us from the answers of our natural questions. For some reason, there has been a huge effort to keep the curious mindset away from us.

Religion has to be the biggest attempt at stopping these questions. Although some religions tend to recommend questioning, Christianity, does not. I am using Christianity as my example because it once effected my life, and effects the lives of so many people around me. Being from a rural part of the south, everyone went to church. Atheists were talked about like aliens. With phrases like, “he is so lost”, or, “he thinks he knows everything.” Little did I know, one day I would share the same label as these people. 

As a child, I always had so many questions about life and god, that my mother couldn’t answer. When she couldn’t I looked to other places. Science documentaries became one of my favorite things to watch as a young child. While many kids watched spongebob, I would’ve rather have watch the Discovery Channel. This being said, I didn’t make the turn to free thinking until around age 18. But my early curiosity in science gave me a head start on others. I would bring my new knowledge of science back to my mother, and then would be scolded for, “Believing such a mess”, and that I should, “Never question God, no matter what you hear.” I did not realize how detrimental this response could be to a young child until later in life. For the time, I just took her advice. As I got older and saw my religion conflicting with my love of science, I made the subconscious decision to keep them in a separate boxes in my mind. By doing this, I was putting a limit of what I could learn from science.

Going to college and getting away from all the people that caused my uncurious mindset to form, was one of the best things that could’ve happened to me. I had also joined a fraternity that was about 80% atheist. Thinking about this now that I have a good grasp on greek life in general, I am amazed. Slowly, with the support of my friends, I left behind my religion and found new a meaning of life through philosophy. I was atheist before I studied philosophy. Its actually sort of crazy because when I was introduced to philosophy, everything I had been thinking had made sense. I then knew that I was not alone in my thoughts and they were shared by many people throughout history. I then enrolled in a philosophy class. This is my second with Dr. Oliver. I am thankful that you (Dr. Oliver) have taken a part in my journey and I would like to thank you for being a great teacher, and opening my eyes to a lot of things. 

In the next installment, I will be covering the great minds that has asked some of the biggest questions of all time, and the consequences they faced for doing so.