I’m not a big fan of religion - of any kind, and especially these… well what can I call them? The ones that has their roots soaked in aggression, with more of a violent history behind them, like Christianity, Islam and Judaism, some of the bigger religions out there. I’m not much of a historian though, so this is basically just what I perceive them as. I have more respect for the eastern religions and philosophy, like for instance Buddhism. Either way, I don’t like reading about religion and I feel I get frustrated every time I see some religious zealots on TV. But reading Angels & Demons today made me look at religions in another light, Dan Brown puts everything in a way that makes reading about religion and its history interesting.

One thing specially made me realise that those of us that regards science higher than religion (like myself), aren’t very different from those that believe in a god, whether it be God, Allah, Buddha or any other deity of your choice. That thing was what he wrote about antimatter and duality. Like how everything has an opposite; angel/demon, heaven/hell, harmony/chaos, or say matter/antimatter. Antimatter, when coming into contact with matter (pick any element in the periodic table) will annihilate and create energy far beyond that of a nuclear bomb, and by some it is thought to be the reason behind the big bang. If only I had a better way with words, I could have put this in a more beautiful and meaningful way, but what he wrote was basically something along the lines of this: I believe in the big bang (or rather it is what makes most sense to me at the moment), but is it any different from believing in a big source of energy creating the universe, than it is to believe in a god (who might perhaps be made out of pure energy)? I clinge to science and physics laws, which we still know nothing about in the universal sense. The laws are man-made, just as the Bible (Christianity), Qur’an (Islam), Torah (Judaism) or Tripiá¹­aka (Buddhism) is. E = mc² you say, how do you know? Every day scientists finds facts that contradicts old beliefs of physics. In the grand scale of things we are no wiser than those that believe in a god.

Buddha got it right:

• All that we are is the result of what we have thought. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him. If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him.
• All things appear and disappear because of the concurrence of causes and conditions. Nothing ever exists entirely alone; everything is in relation to everything else.
• Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.
• Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.
• Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.

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