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Sorry, my long-delayed Teen Angst is suddenly kicking in in full force. Please bear with me.

What do you do when you're at war with yourself? My mind says full speed ahead, knowledge is key, but my heart is telling me to hold back and enjoy the moment while I still can. I'm not sure whether I'd prefer to succeed in the future at the cost of the present or whether I want to be happy now at the cost of the future. After all, what is all the wealth of the world without someone to share it with, but what use is all the pleasure of a moment after the moment is gone? I'm just really confused and conflicted right now.

For most of my life, I've scorned the silly childhood diversions that so many others seemed to delight in as a waste of time, but now I find myself longing to redo it all and squeeze everything I can from my vanishing childhood. This is my last year of high school, and what comes next? Four to eight years of college work, followed by a lifetime of hard work in a probably boring job with little or no time for what little fun I used to enjoy? I don't have time to pause and reflect, but I can't help but stop and wonder what life could have been if I had taken the time to enjoy myself. Now it's almost too late, and I find myself seriously considering going out in a blaze of hedonistic fatalism. Please; if you have anything you can say that might help me, one way or the other, say it now.

What do you think; at what point do demonstrations for change cross the line into terrorism? Is all demonstration terrorism? Does it only become terrorism when it includes property damage? Does it become terrorism when people get hurt? If a group of thousands has already tried every less violent form of protest for years but seen no progress whatsoever, do you believe that they are justified in resorting to more intrusive and violent methods to get their point across? Where does protest end and terrorism start?

So many theists seem to object to the label "mythology" when applied to their own religion, yet have no problem applying it to the ancient greek, egyptian, norse, or asian religions. How much difference is there, really? You both have all sorts of rather fantastic stories about your god(s) and their prophets which, let's face it, are pretty much certainly exaggerated which are collected into a coherent idea. Neither of you has more evidence than the other, so how are their beliefs amusing fairytales while yours are serious and well-founded ideologies to spread the truth?

If you want examples of said exaggerations, take a look at Jonah and the whale, the great flood, Moses talking to god through a BUSH, and moses getting the ten commandments from god. You know what most people could do in that time? Most people could actually carve their own tablets in the amount of time he spent up there! (Sorry this is all judeo-christian/islam related stuff, but I don't know much about other religions) Are those likely to be really factual?

I don't mean spiritually or philosophically or anything; none of the evil, work of the devil, curses stuff. I mean literally. How many people would prefer to be in a room with no lights or windows to being in a lit one, or being outside at night to being outside during the day? Is this common or just something that happens occasionally?

I don't really mean the questions on here, I want to know why there are so many theists who attack other people to try to convince them of different beliefs. We have already had 4 or so Crusades from the Christians, suicide bombings around Israel, Muslims crashing planes into buildings, the Holocaust, a fight between Britain and Catholocism over puritanism, a variety of partial social purges of people who believe in different things, and everyone still insists that God is on their side in every war. Why does everyone try to kill everyone else that doesn't agree except atheists? If anyone has ever heard of a war started by Atheists and fought by Atheists to spread the cause of Atheism, please tell me, because right now they seem like the few sane people that are alive. They don't kill other people to try to make people believe what they do, they don't send around evangelists to people's doors, they don't start wars to spread their beliefs or slaughter innocent women and children to do the same. On the other hand, most of the theists that stand out enough for me to hear about them seem to go around starting wars and using terror tactics to try to convert people. Why can't they all just leave well enough alone? The world has enough sadness already: why do we have to make more just to try to spread our belief about some omnipotent being who we can't actually prove exists and who obviously has so little interest in the world that he never answers a single one of my prayers?

Why is it that all the intellectual failures get big, important, high-paying jobs with lots of power, while most of the people that were actually smart enough to do their homework regularly get the low-paying jobs without enough power to tell their bosses that they're being stupid?

Take government, especially the presidency (USA). I think most people would agree that most recent presidents have been idiots. At least Obama's trying, but how many times in the past 20 or so years have you thought "hey, that makes a lot of sense!" about the latest government announcement? Now take Microsoft: Bill Gates has about as much computer sense as my little finger, and the programmers he got were the ones who got rejected everywhere else. The basic Windows operating system: giant space-hog with lots of crappy programs that either crash or freeze the computer. It takes years of patches just to get the system semi-stable. Now take the infamous Vista system. Take the merit of Windows base 0 and divide it by 4. You get Vista. After Vista, they finally realized that the programs had to actually work for people to buy them, but their programmers are so pathetic that they had to take ideas from other programs that actually work like tabs. Compare it with Linux or Unix: compact, simple operating systems that you can just add stuff to and it works, but Microsoft made a mint off of its crappy product by advertising the s* out of it. Now an actually good company with potential shows up with a better product and new ideas (Mac), and what does Microsoft do? It tries to sue the the company into submission for plagiarism on ideas Microsoft never owned over rediculous loopholes and tries to steal yet another idea for itself and shut out the competition. (Oh, and Mac isn't innocent either, the board actually FIRED its one moneymaking employee because they were happy to sit and do nothing, then had to beg to get him back when they started losing money)

With the possible exception of engineers, it seems like the stupidest people make the most money by exploiting the work of smart people who actually have a useful skill. WTF?!?

For anyone with the patience to actually read all this, thanks.

I! Don't! Care what you think, just as long as it's about me; the best of us can find happiness in misery.

What is this "debt to society" thing about? What do we owe to society that isn't cancelled out by other factors, such as: society raised us but every person who survives increases its chance of success, and that society educates us but, again benefits mostly itself (we were perfectly happy sitting in trees with no school)?

In school, I can never just become friends with someone. It either takes two week of camp in a group together or 3/4 of the school year before I really start to talk to people (a bit shorter for nerds). Why do I take so long when some of my other friends can walk up to someone and be good friends in a couple of minutes?

There's this girl at school that I like, but I can never work up the nerve to tell her and want to still be her friend after I do. I'm really shy and don't really want anyone besides her to know. How should I do it? :\

Just materialistically, of course, not spiritually, please no one say "No because God wouldn't like it" or anything like that. Because really, a lot of wars have been caused by religions and differences in belief. The crusades, Hitler's war against Jews, King Henry vs the Church, Cromwell, Europe vs the Africans and Native Americans, the US's war against Muslim terrorists, Egypt vs the Hebrews, etc. I'm just wondering if the world would be better if religions didn't exist...?

Serious answers only, please!

In our lives, we are born, can't do anything for a couple of years, get to goof off for three more, then get packed off to school where we end up spending most of the day sitting at desks and listening yo (often really boring) teachers. During the thirteen years we spend in normal school, we get progressively less time to do what we feel like and more time to finish onerous papers and other assignments that the teachers give us. After High School, it seems like a functional, sane society would give us a little bit of a break, but instead we get sent to a college to study for for several more years. And even then, after we have pretty much devoted thirteen of the best years of our lives being indoctrinated with whatever society feels we should be taught (if not even more), there is no break. We either get a job or die/live in a constant state of walking death. During said job, we have to obey bosses who are sometimes cruel, contrary or stuck up or we get fired and have to start over in another job. That generally means that we get the oh so incredible priviledge of sitting in an office, staring at screens, and kissing the boss' boots.

Basically what I'm getting at is that we only really get three years of freedom before the age of 50-60 and then get maybe another ten to twenty years that we remember, but that we can't do most things in because we are old and often starting to break down. After 80 a lot of people get Alzhiemers so nothing after that really counts. So, really, we only get 3 years to have fun before we are expected to take up the burden of the rest of a world that is quickly being destroyed around us. Given this, what's the point of it all, because in return for 40 years of work ee get three years at the very beginning when we can't even understand how messed up everything is?