Letters to the Editor
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don't be afraid
Whatever your heart tells you is the truth - don't be afraid to believe it. True "faith" isn't about clapping loudly so Tinkerbelle won't die; it's about having the courage to say, "I really did have a spiritual experience." Or on the other hand, having the courage to say, "When all the other people at my church were saying, 'Couldn't you feel the Holy Spirit moving among us,' I felt nothing."
Don't lie. Listen. And then believe in what you learn.
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not a useful answer.
"My belief in no God, which has sustained me since high school, is starting to feel shaky." is NOT a good summary of the question.
Nowhere does he say his atheism is shaky. He says that he's frightened by the logical consequences of it -- that he and everyone he loves will be swept away by time.
More power to him for seeing the voidness in all things. You just have to learn to love it. If we all lived forever, imagine how dull it would be, how little incentive to get up in the morning. This is the only life you have, you have to use it as if every day is your last, because in a generalized sense it is.
Once you've looked behind the puppet show and seen that no one is pulling the strings, the chances are that you aren't going to come around to believing in some cosmic Father who provides meaning to make the Universe work. Surely you'd rather have this finite period of time to live, love, work and play than nothing at all? So make the best of it, and never fear.
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Buck up, buckaroo
As did the letter writer, I strongly doubted god-belief in primary school, adopted the stance of agnostic skeptic and started using the "A" word by high school.
I'll admit that I would be full of hubris and prideful to claim to know the yet-unknown but as I've aged and hopefully become more insightful I am more convinced than ever of the non-existence of that which we label "god". Perhaps humans will find something that deserves the appellation but as conceived, no, there is no deity.
And while self-examination at all stages of life is useful and necessary, self-doubt can make it tempting to vacillate but I see that as romantic nostalgia just as we wish for "happy endings" or that modern non-event "closure".
There is no god. Be strong. Live free.
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Welcome to Existentialism (but it's not as meaningless as it sounds)
Hello fellow lapsed believer,
I too grew up with religion, but then I lost my faith completely. At first, it was a shock as all foundations seemed to crumble-- emptiness and meaninglessness loomed and overpowered. And later, when I used to say I was agnostic, my family and other religious folk would say "But you have to believe in something, you have to have something to take comfort in."
There's the irony: if you consider the logic of many religions and really truly think them through, you'll find them far less comforting than you originally thought. For instance, my first questions as a Christian were "How could God let his chosen people suffer so horribly in the Holocaust?" - A classic question for JudeoChristian faiths; some other choice ones are, "How can God want a 'Holy War' with suicide bombers, etc. The book "The End of Faith" pretty much covers all kinds of this philisophical territory.
And all answers anyone could come up with were either absurd, or skirted the question with theological abstraction, or else conjured up a God that was so cruel and twisted (as he is in the Book of Job, using Job as a pawn in a power game with the Devil) that the idea of no God at all was infinitely more comforting to me. It explained that all of the horrific things in life were for reasons other than "God's will" or variations thereof. It means that we aren't chess pieces in the cosmos. It means that we as humans have to understand why horrors happen, and we have to act as if no divine force will ever, ever save us or anyone else. It also means that acts of goodness aren't bargaining chips for heaven -- they are Meaning Itself.
This to me is very, very meaningful-- it means every moment counts, it means we (all of humanity) create most aspects of the world we live in, it means we are often our brother's keeper and that compassion is crucial toward understanding the human condition. Create meaning by helping people or contributing to the world -'God' certainly won't do it for you. The shock you feel is the realization of this fact.
Start reading the great works of literature and you will see multitudes of meaning (and the search thereof) in the human condition. Sometimes the search itself tells you much about existence that religious fairytales fail to. (After all, they were the great works of literature in their day that sought to give meaning to the human condition, but human civilization was in its infancy back then)
Once you begin to explore existence (not to mention the infinitely amazing scientific perspective of the natural world-- see Carl Sagan's "Demon Haunted World" for a primer) you'll come to a point where you'll look back and think of God the way you once thought of Santa Claus: A former fiction from childhood that gave you hope and reason when you didn't know how to find it yourself.
PS. I don't fault anyone who relies on religion to help them through tragedy. If you're in a war zone or have cancer, let God get you through it. If you're not, then help someone in a war zone or who has cancer and let the fairy tale die.
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Atheism is a religion...
Believing there is no God is as much of a leap of faith, as much of a belief system, as religion.
There is a middle road - agnosticism. Agnosticism means that neither the presence nor the absence of God has been proven. It leaves the door open to consider all of the mind- and space- and time-warping possibilities in between. It means that, somewhere in between belief and non-belief, between God (as God has been presented by organized religion throughout history) and no God, lies reality. It means that, as humans evolve, we discover more and more about our physical and non-physical universe (yay science!), and we correct prior mis-conceptions and form new ones (hopefully with the understanding that we only know what we know now and such newly-formulated conceptions may need adjustment at a later date due to future discoveries). Reality is an ever-changing, ever-expanding concept.
I am the same age as the LW and, similarly, I broke with organized religion years ago. I have zero faith that primitive men had more insight into what lies beyond than we do today. Primitive man just happened to be the first to employ new technology (the written word) to turn what was formerly folklore into "truth", and we've been stuck for centuries since.
(Joseph Campbell wondered what the story of God and the hereafter would be today if, as in the past, our belief grew out of folklore (which evolved based on experience, discovery, and advancement) instead of from reading a book, frozen in time, full of stagnant ideas. The evolution of the story was halted and, according to Campbell, the world has been going to hell in a handbasket since.)
But swinging to the other side of the pendulum didn't make sense to me, either. I've just never had any faith in the worm-food theory, and besides, I've had too many experiences (especially since my mother died) that cannot be explained by science or logic.
So, as I journey on through life, I believe that I do not know, and perhaps never will know, the truth about God, or faith, or any of it. But I am quite content in the knowledge that some day, hopefully not too soon, I will discover the wondrous truth myself. And that is enough for me.