Dear Oblivion,

My name is Emily Grace Waters, and I am almost seventeen years old. My father is an alcoholic, and my mother smokes weed. I am a junior at Culver Creek High School and I have made all As and Bs until this year. I also attended church every Sunday and Wednesday until this year. I live in a VERY small town called Culver Creek and it is constantly raining. We haven’t had a sunny day in over a month, which has given me a lot of time to think. I have been Christian all of my life, but there is one question that no one can answer for me- “Why do bad things happen to good people?” I do believe that I have finally found my own answer to this question. Because maybe there was a God, and a Jesus, and whatever else the Bible claims, but they are dead, and it is gone. Because everything that comes together, must fall apart. Bad things happen to good people, because bad things happen to everyone. There is no amazing mastermind over all of us controlling and witnessing everything that goes on in the world. If there was, and it was God, and God is good, then bad things wouldn’t happen to good people and the world would be good and we wouldn’t have horrible things like cancer, homeless children, or world hunger.

When you really think about it, Christianity is just silly. Christians believe that a talking snake with legs told some random naked lady in the middle of some garden to eat an apple off of a “forbidden tree”, and that that caused everything bad in the world. Anyone who would believe that is foolish. But I am no fool, so I do see that religion is just something that our ancestors made up to make our time spent here on Earth bearable.

I mean, you sit around and pray for someone else to fix the problems in your life. Religion is such a lazy thing. Almost all of the problems that we pray about are capable of being fixed by ourselves. God isn’t going to cure cancer. But that doesn’t mean we let people die. It means we find the cure ourselves. God isn’t going to end world hunger. This doesn’t mean that we let people starve. It means that we feed the people. We are the ones with the power to do this. If God had the power to do this, and just hasn’t yet, then he is a sick God.

Christians say that Atheists believe in nothing. This is not true for all. We do not believe in religion. Religion is just another silly label that people use to judge each other. So I choose not to believe in such a silly thing. Because after all, everything that comes together must fall apart. God can’t even find a way around that.

My parents are terrible people, and they call me terrible names, and do terrible things to me. Any God that would let things like this happen is not a God that I would like to follow, anyhow.
- Emily Grace Waters

I wrote that letter when I was 17 years old. I am now 26. I have completed high school, and college. I moved out as soon as I turned 18. My father died the year that I left from- get this- alcohols poisoning. My mother was murdered a year later behind a shopping mall. I still believe everything I wrote in this letter so many years ago. But I have learned a lot since then. I have learned that we don’t need religion to make life bearable. We don’t need to cure cancer or to end world hunger to make life bearable. All we need is to find what makes us happy, whether it is religion, or a person, or a job, or whatever. We need to find it, know that it is real, and hold onto it with everything we have, because what comes together does fall apart, and we will lose the thing that makes us happy. But if we hold on as tight as we can, our happiness will never truly be lost. It will always be with whatever your something was. And if you don’t have a something, looking for it makes this world bearable. And if you have your something, that’s what makes this world bearable. And if you have lost your something, let the others know that the world is bearable, and how great it can be once you find your something.