How do you deal with life now that you are an atheist? (With a little of my life)

[brewer]

It is/was all a fantasy that was filling you head with false hope and false promises. It is all a man made delusion used for comfort, power and control.

Dealing with life is easy once you drop the rock. Sounds like you're still trying to drop yours.

[pocaracas]

So, the question is: How do you face the unavoidable reality of life, with no God by your side?

Yes... emotions suck.

How do you face the reality of life after losing a loved one? A parent, a grandparent, a lover, a friend?
How?
How?!
Tell me!!!
HOW!??!!?

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No answer, huh?

It's the same thing for an imaginary "friend".
The imaginary friend that other people inserted into your mind since your birth.
The imaginary friend that permeates the culture in which you were born.

How do you live your life after losing that friend?

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You just move along... one day at a time...

Until the memory becomes a distant blip... until your brain fills it up with new memories, new joys, new friends, new lovers, new adventures.

Welcome to the other side. Please fasten your seat belt and let reality blow your mind!

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[Jesster]

I don't "deal" with life any more than I used to when I was a Christian. Actually, life is much more meaningful to me now. If I only get one chance at life, I plan to use it to its fullest potential. My life feels so much more free than it was before.

There was more on the line for me though. On top of the usual issues with life, I'm also transsexual. There's no way I could have come out of the closet while I was still a Christian. I wasn't even really living until I broke out of my religious shell, so death isn't very scary anymore now that I've moved on. If I die now, then at least I learned to live an honest life.

The Christian god is an oppressive tyrant. I'm not too fond of the other gods out there either. I'm glad there's nothing like that in my life.

[robvalue]

I've always being an atheist so it's a bit different for me.

However, here's two things which hopefully will be worth some thought:

1) You haven't lost anything. You were just given false information about what you had. You're still the same person, and whatever "effects" religion had can be achieved just as well, if not better, in other ways. God is part of you. It always has been. It's just other theists haven't realised this fact yet.

2) I would consider it a narrow escape to find out this is actually the one and only life (in all likelihood). Imagine the alternative. Coasting through this life, always thinking it's just the warm up act for the real existence. What a waste. The sooner you realise this is your one shot, the more you can make of it. Life has value precisely because it is finite. What value does it have as a weird trial for some bored sky daddy?

[purplepurpose]

Gods offer of becoming his slave is as bad as death, thats why hell with torture is present in religious doctrine.

[The Grand Nudger]

@ op q

The same way that people who -do- have "god by their side" face the unavoidable realities of life.  As others have noted, the "god" bit was a mis-attribution of your own abilities, abilities which you and I and everyone else are likely to share.

(As a point of useless trivia, the nt narrative regarding christ taken as a metaphor for one's self - very literally as the archetypal man- is arguably a more robust and meaningful reading of both the text and the body of philosophy underpinning it, around which the narrative is formed. This alone provides a useful explanation for the success of the narrative..and is at least half-heartedly embraced even by those who believe it to be a news report.)

[Cyberman]

So, the question is: How do you face the unavoidable reality of life, with no God by your side?

The same way as theists do, except without pretending to myself that there is a god by my side. Apologies if that sounds cold; reality is as reality does.

[vorlon13]

" . . . God by their side . . . "

So, what does that mean and how could it work?  Is 'God' by the side of Hindus, Presbyterians, Shiites, Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, Mennonites, Jews, Lutherans, Catholics, Wiccans, Methodists, Conjespresites, Mammonites, Sunnis, Buddhists, Baptists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Catholics, and Anglicans all at the same time ??

If God isn't by all of them, how do the ones he isn't beside know that ??

And how can the rest of us tell ??

[Neo-Scholastic]

Existential angst romanticizes the lonely and ultimately futile struggle against complete annihilation. At the same time, it places the burden of finding significance on the individual existent. It is both a liberating and terrifying place to live, each day saying “yes” to a world grinding inevitably toward an eternal “no”.

At least that’s how I felt when for many years following that day on the train, the day when I admitted to myself that I no longer believed in God, I traded away the false hopes of simplistic Christian faith for the wistfully pleasant contemplation of my alienation from an indifferent universe.

Like you, I trust the scientific method to reveal truths about the natural world and dispel superstition. Like you do now, I once found prayer an empty gesture to an absent god. I saw organized religion as a sham and theological speculations ungrounded. In contrast to the previous posts let me at least give you my perspective as former atheist.

Personally I think people can only support that seductive sense of the human condition in a godless universe for so long. Eventually the reductive view of Man prevails leaving atheists with the bleak conviction that human beings are electro-chemical reactions advanced by chance and necessity. We are only physical and purely physical things aren’t about anything; they just are. That perspective is literally dehumanizing because it dismisses as illusions the very things that make us human, such as rationality, signification, choice, and personal identity.

As I see it, hope is not about clinging to comforting illusions; but the choice to leave open the possibility that human beings are more than we think they are. It is about taking the existential stance that our capacity for reason reflects something fundamental about the universe (not a convenient instinct) and that experience can access facts about reality (a relation versus alienation). These are two ideas that lead me away from atheism although I did not realize so at first.

[Arkilogue]

People believed in the afterlife long before Christianity. Egypt was an entire civilization built around being prepared to navigate the afterlife.

Personally I've had an NDE where I popped out to look down on the water at my drowning body and I had the distinct time, space and volition to consider fully leaving the planet or return to my body. I felt nothing but peace in all directions so I motioned to leave and then a multi-layered voice (the voices of many women with the lead voice as my physical mother) simply said "Don't go yet". That was all it took for me to consider the consequences for others if I "died" which of course would devastate them and it would be a selfish decision. I would of course die again eventually and the same state would be waiting for me so I decided to return to my body.

There was more that occurred but that was a major part of the experience and I lost all fear of death. Now I "fear" not truly living.


I don't if it helps or not, or even if it can. Just relaying to you my experience in the same field.