The entirety of my early childhood was filled with the charming idea that when people die, the good ones go to Heaven and the bad ones don't. My parents, my friends, my teachers, and others I held as role models all affirmed this idea. When my dog died (a crushing moment in my life), my mom told me, "Try not to cry over her, she is happier now" because of course All Dogs Go to Heaven.

As a naive child I considered myself a Christian simply because it seemed like everyone in my little mountain town was. I thought it was natural and that the whole world must be Christian. It wasn't until late elementary school when I was told- very blatantly- by my friend that I was "not Christian" did I realize that it was a choice that not one everyone had to adhere to.

Since then, theology has greatly interested me. I researched Buddhism, Hinduism, Mythology, and Islam and each of them were just as intriguing to me as the last. But despite their differences, they all have a central theme: if you do good, you get rewarded. In Christianity it's Heaven, in Buddhism it's Karma, Islam is Paradise, etc.. The basic concept for all is if you follow the morals of the religion and are devout, you get rewarded when you die.

When I noticed this trend at a young age, I began asking hard questions: if God loves everyone, why would he send anyone to Hell? Will my soul be sent to Heaven or into a cycle of reincarnation? What will happen to me when I die? With my research into theism, I began to develop my own ideology. This ideology was based on hope. I hoped that there was life after death. I hoped that there was some deity directing the traffic in our little lives. I hoped that my loved ones were going to Heaven and the evil to Hell and I hoped that when I closed my eyes for the last time, they would open again somewhere new. But even as these hopes carried me through my days I've always had this nagging feeling that they were false and inevitably, death would bring nothing.

To me, Atheism is respectable in that atheists accept that nothing happens in the end, so, they have no personal incentive to do good. For any of their charitable acts they don't expect some grand reward to be gifted them when they die. While not all Atheists are charitable, the ones who are don't expect Heaven or Karma, they realize that their only chance to do good and make a difference is here and now while they are alive. Einstein put it perfectly when he said "if people are only good because they fear punishment and hope for a reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed."

There are many admirable atheists I can look up to (including Einstein): Bill Nye (the Science Guy), Neil deGrasse Tyson, Clarence Darrow, and Stephen Hawking. And although atheists can be found in most demographics, there is a surprisingly high amount in the field of science. This is because atheism and the scientific method both demand facts, data, and evidence before something can be accepted as true. As I've gotten to know myself, I realize that I am an evidence and fact based person. If I can't see it for myself then I won't simply accept that it's there. What I lack is faith. As pleasant as Heaven sounds, I just don't have the faith that is required to believe it's there for me.

But there is still something that stops me from aligning myself with atheism; it terrifies me. Just like it astounds me that consciousness and thought can arise from what is simply an arrangement of atoms, the idea that there is nothing beyond this material life is mind boggling. It's a sad thought to think that all of my worth will be based on my one, maybe 90-year span of life. Whether I lead an admirable life or not doesn't matter right? It doesn't change that death brings nothing and my life will be the smallest blip in the spans of time.

And yet, is that true? Atheism has taught me that the value of one lifetime can be vast and powerful. Just like there are fossils left of cyanobacteria that are 3.5 billion years old, anyone has the capacity to leave their own fossil record. While one person's life may not be valuable at the cosmic scale, there are still people and a place left existing after one dies. These people and this place can find a lot of value in the words and actions of one person. If you don't believe me, think of people like MLK, Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, etc. Whether they believed in Heaven or not doesn't really matter. What matters is that they left the world a little better than they found it and that's a pursuit admirable enough for me.

Check out this Atheism debate: