Write 5 pages thesis on the topic the loss of values. The loss of an ideal can potentially be far more devastating than the concrete things and even those human individuals surrounding us. We live and connect to reality through our minds, and a fundamental change in that realm has the power to change everything else in one’s life.

For much of my life, religion and my belief in God were among the top in my hierarchy of values, standing above all other ideals that I could name explicitly. It had been this way for as long as I could remember, spending time in Church, getting to know the Scriptures and the minutiae of theism. My faith shaped the entire mindset that I experienced the world with: it provided the structure to my perceptions and the basis for my normative judgment. Unshakeable, unbreakable faith is a curious phenomenon: something which cannot, by definition, be proven wrong, by whatever means. Such faith denotes those things which one is absolutely, perfectly certain cannot be otherwise. This is how I felt about the teachings of religion and the God that it spoke of. With theism rooted so profoundly in my life, how could it be extricated?

On December 26, 2004, news emerged that a massive earthquake beneath the Indian Ocean had spawned a tsunami that inundated communities with waves reaching as high as one hundred feet in the air. Over 280,000 people from eleven different countries perished under the waves because of the decontamination of natural resources that followed (Boulanger). The tsunami and its aftereffects constituted the second deadliest earthquake in all human history and, by far, the most devastating natural disaster in my lifetime. Watching it unfold on television, with bodies stacked like bricks in the hot sunshine, struck me as the most horrific loss of life imaginable. Images of emaciated and malnourished children, women, and men occupied my mind for the following weeks. The problems that arose for me, dealing with these thoughts, was not with the humanitarian response to the disaster (which seemed lackluster from the beginning), but with how an all-powerful, all-loving God could allow (or purposefully perpetrate) such an atrocity. Like a square in a circled hole, my theistic worldview could not accommodate the unspeakable horror and suffering unfolding a world away. With this contradiction and the masses’ suffering more apparent than God’s existence, I lost my faith.

nfolding only one day after Christmas, the disaster revealed to me, for seemingly the first time, not only the incalculable suffering in those affected countries but around the world. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair summed it up nicely by saying that there is the equivalent of a “man-made preventable tsunami every week in Africa,” referring of course to the ten thousand people who perish daily from malaria and AIDS (Shekhar).