I've just come back from my weekly philosophy/religion discussion group, something I do because I enjoy questioning and was invited by a friend to participate in at a time when I needed something additional in my life.

After two years of going, I've found myself now at the stage of having to ponder the question of 'the end time', the end of the world, 'revelations' and the found myself lost in a maze of disbelief and frustration that I cannot see through spectacles tinted with faith in the same way my peers can.

I know little so far of 'Revelations' despite having grown up with it as a child and as such am a layman in the actual written words describing the time when the world ends and things get really quite bad. For my associates that have reached a point in their lives where the bible seems to 'make sense' without them needing to think about it and brings them a huge amount of peace, I feel the grandest sense of envy and jealousy. The way in which the content of a book authored by so many individuals can harbour the truth of our past and our future and followed unquestionably as having the literal truth impressed into its translation from Hebrew to English fills me with awe and dread at the same time.

I genuinely want to believe and to a degree I feel that I have a sense that the mysteries of the world, though many have been answered by science, still remain beyond our grasp for a reason. The space between you and I, the atomic substructure that has been created by the laws of the Universe are so fantastical that I shudder in trying to comprehend an explanation for its majesty and how I as a concious being am meant to relate to everything that I am not - the Universe and all it contains. But God? In having a relationship to the God of the two testaments, would I truly be able to equate all the bible says as the true word of God, despite the fact that I know all humans to be fallible in someway and therefore the editing of the 'good book' has to be flawed in some way or another.

At a time when I don't trust myself or any motivation that anyone around me may have in life, why or how could the contents of a book written by people whose agenda was so desperate to fulfill a long standing prophecy become for me a certainty? The singular rock of my core?

The way I feel at the moment is bitter. Bitter that the bible can be so ambiguous as to not allow an average man such as me to come to peace due to the simple fact that man has interfered with God through religion. In humanising the 'end of the world', the wrath and rapture, the fractured earth that will see humanity decline into those who have and those who have not got 'faith', I find myself angry at the Universe or God or both for burdening us with such a weapon of mass ambiguity as the bible.

When the world outside my window can test the foundations of religion to such a fundamental level on a daily basis - to what should I attach my life's purpose, sense of direction and beliefs for my future and the rationale behind my past.

I don't want to be one of those people who can only explain the world away through ancient scripture. The wisdom of my forefathers should surely not be greater than the combined wisdom they have left for me to interpret and add to. If the bible is 'it', prohibiting additions to itself or not allow for its core philosophy to benefit from human progress, then on what grounds did humanity deserve to be stifled 2000 years ago by a book that claims the past and future as its own on one thread - Jesus. If the old testament was superceded by the new, when can the new be superceded again. Why can wikipedia not be the third gospel, the facts of Universe - warning us to heed what we were told by revelations - that the end of the world will come and we shuld prepare ourselves to escape this planet and evolve to leave the worst of our species behind. Our self-righteousness as human authors of a allegedly 'godly' work have set us up to forever debate the truth.

If there is any truth in the phrase 'nothing worth knowing can ever be taught', surely the teachings of the bible are not worth knowing because they distract us from marvelling at the Universe and its structure, beauty and elegance - not to allow us to suppose that it was designed by an intelligence beyond our own but God is everything else, no need to reduce it to human terms - God is everything, everything is God. Lets not simplify it to a time bound existence on one planet in the solar system over a few thousands of years.

At what point did having 'faith' become more virtuous than helping people, compassion, the giving of joy, selflessness and the like. Why should having faith give you such greater rewards and why should those who claim to have act in ways less virtuous than many who have been unable to accept it on the terms laid down in the bible?

Our understanding of the passage of time seems hugely limited by language and comprehensibility. I struggle to believe that we're any more in command of things with a bible than we are without it. And the threat of damnation does little to inspire me to thinking that organised religion has any greater credibility in bringing people to harmony with the Universe and its contents than the disorganised agnosticism I seem to have acquired at this point in life.

Rant over.

Night world.