Letters to the Editor
-
Is Atheism dead?
If there is an all powerful loving god it would seem that the following would not be occuring. The planet is covered with excrement (can't his Divine Plan exclude that)? Justice seldom prevails. Rain falls in the wrong places. Bacteria, viruses, poison snakes, etc serve no good purpose for us, his chosen. One could go on, but why bother? There's probably no god in any accepted sense of that word, so we're on our own with the help (we hope) of friends and kin. Courage, John George -- age 71
-
Something Else
I believe that something larger than I am exists. I don't know how to define it. I can't define it--and that's okay. I want to believe in something--that there is a force that has some control over the universe. On the other hand, I definitely don't believe in any organized religion. No matter the name you give to the religion, once it is in the control of humans, it becomes a way to control other humans.
I can't accept a god who would torture his "children" with dreadful diseases and calamities, who would find pleasure in one group of his children killing another group "in his name." That is simply senseless. That is the result of humans using religion to control other humans and why I reject organized religion.
-
Familiar Territory
I've had a similar experience, as I think many others have, and the way I understand it now is that I experienced the death of the god concept that I'd grown up with and that had sustained me for years. It's a strange and tantalizing paradox, but I think one must move *through* this kind of a-theism to emerge on the other side with a renewed, though unalterably different, understanding of God--if that is indeed one's goal.
A recommended reading: Emmanuel Levinas, "Useless Suffering" (from Entre Nous, Columbia University Press, 1998).
-
It is supposed to be hard
If you were confident in your atheism, then you were no better than a person that believes in God. You are having a crisis of faith. But, in this case, your faith is that there is no God. If you posit that there is a higher being, then you have gone to the other side and chosen faith in a God. You will have exchanged one faith for another faith.
I don't know if there is a God. It is a gray area in my life, and I accept that I may never know the answer to this question. I categorize it in the same way I do with questions like: how many stars are in the universe and how many grains of sand are on a beach. There are things that cannot be known, IMO. But, I understand that people have the need to know. I have that need too, but I can mute it, for the most part.
So, what I am trying to get at is that life is a mystery. We cannot know if there is or isn't a God or Gods. And, if you derive meaning from external sources that cannot be seen or touched or tested, then it is your choice. But, I prefer to derive meaning from the people I know and can impact. I derive meaning from society and the people I love and love me. Because, in my opinion (IMO), if I am looking for meaning outside of my actions, then I am deluding myself.
-
Atheism is a religion...
... like not collecting stamps is a hobby!
-
Why be a what?
These mental definitions force us to pigeon-hole ourselves. Rather than say that I am a believer or an agnostic or an atheist, I find that there is a truth that does not fit these classifications.
It is just to say that I do not know what happens after death. I do not even know what is happening here. I feel grateful and I appreciate life. I accept that nobody really knows anything. Even if we know what is real, we cannot fit it into our narrow human awareness.
I think the faculty of belief is misused trying to wrap it up in a consumer oriented structure just to fill the gap that we face in the experience of being human. That includes the agnostic tag. The atheist tag is one that is as unfounded as any claim of knowing.
-
The gift of uncertainty
I do think that nonbelievers and nonreligious people have it harder in some ways than believers do. I have often wished that I could just get some religion and enjoy the peace of mind that must come with having a set of answers. I envy the faithful.
But some of us were not made that way, are instead doubters and questioners and hopeful, interested skeptics. It can be depressing; it can be lonely. But I think at the end of the day, whatever difficult emotional/mental terrain we experience is at least authentic uncertainty, honest and brave confusion. And the gift of that uncertainty is that the door remains open: our creative minds are free to roam and conjecture and parse and weigh, to imagine and develop and grow in unexpected and unregimented ways. There's no authority telling us what it's all about, and while that can leave us unmoored, it also leaves us free.
It sounds like the LW is undergoing a difficult phase, but hey, that happens to everybody. I'm not suggesting that there's no point in investigating the possibility of God, I just think that if a person has not already been able to avail himself of religion in the past, that particular ship has probably set sail. You can't undo years of critical thought and just curl up in the fuzzy warm embrace of the Gospel. That's too bad, in some ways, but it's okay.
Nonbelievers have crises like every human. They can be a great struggle, but I also think they can be a great adventure in a way they can't be for someone who has already been given a libretto on life.
-
Don't bother looking for God. He ain't there.
At the very least, the God of the Old and New Testaments certainly does not exist. Doesn't it strike anyone as odd that the God who would strike down the Tower of Babel and level Sodom and Gommorah has not been heard from since? And no, New Orleans doesn't count, because it's still there. Might we not expect the proactive God described in the Bible to have gotten involved in the that whole Holocaust thing, for instance? Or way in on the problems in the Middle East? And as nutty as I find Mormons, it is to their credit that they address the following question: if God wanted to save the whole world, why send his son exclusively to one tiny patch of desert, and leave the rest to missionaries over *centuries*? Spare me the "He moves in mysterious ways" nonsense.
There may be a higher power, but it's obvious he couldn't care less what we're up to. It is up to each of us to give our own lives meaning.