Musings on Religion

It seems to be a general consensus among the online communities I observe or take part in that religions are very unpopular and you are more likely to avoid conflict if you're an atheist. When I first started playing games online, I was around 11 years old and had never encountered anyone really being aggressive about their beliefs.  I wasn't forced to go to church, but I considered myself Christian at the time. No one had ever tried to tell me that Christianity was the only good religion, or in reverse that it was terrible.

When I started playing online, though, I noticed a difference.  It wasn't too often that I told people over the internet about my religion, of course, but making friends online occasionally leads to curious questioning, and I saw no reason to lie about it. I was surprised to see how hated Christianity was amongst most people I talked to at the time. Nearly every person I met while playing Warcraft III claimed to be atheist, and several of them found the need to insult me after asking if I believed in a god. 

I maintained my religious stance, however, and many of the people who I talked to online seemed surprised that I didn't care if someone had a different belief.  I remember one kid specifically saying he thought I was the only Christian he'd ever get along with. I really didn't understand why it was such a big deal since I had never met the people who go around trying to force their religion on you. Even now, I can only say I've encountered a small handful of people who act like that, whereas I've encountered many times more who blindly attack religion. [The popular argument that you have to be stupid to believe in some invisible deity watching over everything remains.]

Religion has been a big conflict starter throughout history, certainly, but it baffles me to see how so many people freak out over the issue still, whether in support of a certain belief or against one. Since I've pretty much been living socially online for a long time now, I've heard a lot of different viewpoints from a lot of different people.  My views have changed somewhat over the years. With something like religion, it's really impossible to prove your point to anyone else.  The primary basis of most religions is FAITH, and that's something that's impossible to give to someone.  [Because of this, I think organized religion is a bit silly.  It limits a person's exposure and often encourages false faith.] Still, I believe there's a god but I'm not going to claim to know anything about him, nor am I going to ask others to believe as I do.

It still bothers me a bit to see people attacking religion so harshly online, if only because they either think that they're better for not believing in anything or they think they've been wronged and deserve to be hostile to others because of it.

"You are required to do nothing, least of all believe. Shut one's eyes tight or open one's arms wide, either way, one's a fool."  -Flemeth, Dragon Age: Origins

Origins

I've been intending to make a blog for some time now, partly because I have a lot of spare time and partly because my brother expressed interest in reading it... So yes, I've finally gotten around to making one.  I doubt I'll often write about much more than my gaming interests, but we'll see, I suppose.

Origins::
In the online world, I generally go by "The Overseer", a name taken as a reference to the Overseer in Fallout 3.  It was sometime in my first week of playing Team Fortress 2 that I decided to change my Steam name; previously it was RedSpiderDance.  I may have stuck with my original name, but I wanted to avoid using anything with red or blue mentioned since TF2's teams are represented by those colours.  I had just beaten Fallout 3 for the third or fourth time when I got TF2, so it was still fresh in mind.  Perhaps at another time I would have chosen a different name for myself, but it would have been annoying to have a name change when I had already become known by the people on the server I frequented at the time.  I've grown quite fond of being The Overseer, anyway; to the point where I usually identify the term 'Overseer' as more feminine than masculine.

Before my Team Fortress 2 days, my online gaming was not very diverse.  I primarily stuck to Warcraft III and GunBound, both incredibly fun games, until I got into World of Warcraft. On Battle.net for Warcraft III, I had several screen names, the first one being 'Asharii', the name of a character I invented that I drew frequently with my school friends.  In World of Warcraft my main was a Night Elf druid, also named Asharii.  I preferred to stick to a healing role as a druid, but I remember being incredibly happy to get cat form at level 20. (Cats are awesome.)  I played on both RP and PvP servers, depending on which friend I was playing with.  I pretty much stopped playing WoW as soon as I got Steam/TF2, but my younger sister still plays. (Maining a Dwarf Shaman and NE Druid, I believe.)

More recently, I've been playing more online games, but TF2 is still my primary focus.  I've taken on another alias, "The Lemonade" which was sort of unintentional, but now I switch my name on Steam on occasion.  With my computer's functional state degrading, I've been playing more League of Legends than TF2 lately, but I should be upgrading my computer at some point in the near future.

Computer upgrades are the best upgrades.