Faith taught me to see the darkness in the world; to avoid it while heavily discussing it in our day to day lives.

Faith taught me to not question the beauty in the world, but to accept it and move on; to thank god and to not investigate any further.

Faith taught me to give up large quantities of my life in the pursuit of a baseless promise.

Seeing things now with the mindset of an atheist has opened up new ways of thinking about the beauty around me. Even now, theists tell me that I can never appreciate the beauty in the world, because I quantify it with chemistry or physics. For some reason, they believe that we can not appreciate art unless it has an artist we can congratulate.

The more I thought about the beauty I saw and could appreciate, the more I saw that being able to investigate the beauty was much more interesting than just thanking god. Why not investigate? Chemical changes can be beautiful physically and drawn on paper. The way our mathematics can help explain the physical world, and help our minds to predict and perceive physical happenings is much more beautiful than an anonymous god just ‘making it so’.

These mathematical equations and chemical reactions did not take the beauty out of what I saw, but instead added to it. While theists are saddened that we can predict chemical, astronomical, physical and mathematical probabilities, atheists can see the beauty in not only being able to predict and see, but also to explore further into what we do not fully understand yet.

Science gives us the tools to look further. Religion gives us a blindfold.