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

[Arkilogue]

I r smrt 2.

Intelligence is as intelligence does.

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The later quote is from the University of Oregon physics department, not me.

And you  agreed with it enough to repost it.
Also shows how those guys from the  University of Oregon physics department ate biased in their thought.

It's like shooting colloquialisms in a barrel!

[The Grand Nudger]

@Those Who Kudo Rythym – Personally, I find it very closed-minded to think that the only two options that explain someone rejecting atheism are dishonesty or mental illness. Again this goes back to the pretense that atheists have a monopoly on logic and reason. I find it hard to believe that some of the AF members I respect would applaud this kind of intolerance.

Except that I was't commenting on any two options for people rejecting atheism..I was commenting on a specific and common line you have a compulsion to repeat.  In your case, it appears to be dishonesty rather than illness...if I had to choose between the two....though personally.....there's a third option I'd go for in combo with it. You just don't know any better, and don't have a better way to express the POV that was spoonfed to you in ignorance. I suppose, though..that this is just another form of simple dishonesty...with oneself, one's knowledge, and ones claimed mastery of rational thought.

Meanwhile, I'm still here, still loving Bach...and you're still avoiding -any- discussion of your own ineptly framed declarations regarding atheism. Now you've moved on to yet another common line christing types have a compulsion for...."intolerance". More accurately translated as "boo hoo, someone disagreed with me..and had the audacity to call out the garbage I peddle for what it is".

: shrugs :

[Cyberman]

I always find it ludicrous when someone draws a conclusion about why I choose to kudos a person. It can only be because I agree 100% with everything that person says and not, say, that I appreciate a pithy phrase or anything, right?

[The Grand Nudger]

I wanted to kudos your post Stimbo....but I didn't want to make anyone feel pissy about it, so I decided not to.  

[Cyberman]

Yep, gotta be real careful these days.

[Jesster]

I'm a rebel. Have some kudos.

[Organic Machine]

I'm still trying to figure that out. I find it hard not to let it consume me at times, honestly. I guess I'm a realist. I seem to walk a weird line between humanist and misanthrope. I mostly keep to myself but I'd kill to make that one connection with someone that I could be with for the rest of my life. It's this amazing thing that we can do, to love someone, and be loved by them, as a comfort for all the uncertainty in this life. That is something that I search for and it keeps me going. I still have hope for things, but it can be difficult with all that uncertainty in this life. I'm beyond curious about what's out there in the universe. I want to see and discover things, but I feel trapped on this planet with so very few people that I relate to. It has kept me from finding much fulfillment in this life. I currently, as I always have, felt aimless and without any sense of purpose. I'm still searching and I hope I'm not old and full of regrets.

[Aroura]

I have a very difficult time with this still.  I wish I had some advice for you.  In all honesty, the thought frequently keeps me awake at night.  I think maybe it just takes time to emotionally process the realization, and perhaps it takes longer for some than for others.

Same here.  I have quite a lot of anxiety because of it.  I think barely a day goes by that I don't think about it.  It actually got quite a bit worse for me recently right after my mother had a stroke.  She survived, but it was like mortality suddenly became very, very REAL.  Now I feel a bit obsessed with it, but I'm doing my best to process it all, (enjoying life, making our own meaning, remembering loved ones gives them a certain kind of immortality, etc) but it's a much slower and more painful process than belief in god and the afterlife was.  

I feel like, at 40+, I've only just now started to gain some wisdom and understand a few things, and that I will never ever really understand or accept it all. I'll probably struggle with it until the day I die.

[Panatheist]

There are some things we simply cannot change. To make peace we must accept them.

There are resources we have within ourselves that can console us and give us insight. In the past we attributed these to a theistic conception of God. Now that concept seems false to you, but that doesn't mean those resources are gone; they simply have a different source than you once thought. I continue to still myself and go within. Sometimes I just sit. Sometimes when I need consolation I still talk to God, my departed grandmother, or whoever - although with the understanding that I am ultimately speaking to myself and any visual, audial, or other response I receive is being generated by my brain. But it still works, it is still useful - it doesn't have to be supernatural to be valuable.

As to death, I never have worried much about it. The universe is a mass of fluctuating energy constantly flowing, moving, changing forms. "I" am merely a part of that. My life is a form of order arising from and maintained by a flux. While that order cannot be maintained forever - except in a certain sense if the universe is a block-space - the universe will. I am a part of the cosmos, and for lack of a better phrase, the cosmos is the "greater part" of me. We return to the cosmos like waves to an ocean: we were never truly separate from it.

I know not everyone will be consoled by that form of an afterlife, so to speak, but it really is enough for me. You will not be bothered by the final breakdown of order within flux that is your life anymore than before you were born, and in the meantime you can enjoy life for what it is and revel in all sorts of possible meanings to give it, even create your own.

Life is temporary, but it really is special, if not to the cosmos as a whole, then at least to us. It is enough.

[robvalue]

Where is the falsifiability in all this?

What is a non-designed reality like, and how do you know this?

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If you've read any of the model I present in other threads, you'd know it is very specifically geometrically designed and is a deterministic metaversal model. Every universe is the same quantum expression  (spatial waveform) of the same original ( solid particle) unity.  The are created in different spaces at different times in regular pattern (ABC sphere stack that is infinite horizontally and finite vertically as a traveling wave form creating planes of universes behind it) and they develop "as they will".

No appeal to random universe creation out of a magical quantum bulk needed.  No special pleading to magical "God made it that way just because"  needed. In fact it blows both the Many Worlds theory and intelligent design argument completely out of the water.

The falsifiability comes in where it makes very specific geometric predictions on the structure of internal universal phenomenon and metaversal constants that are the same for all universes in the model. In an ABC sphere pack (and other maximum density arrangements) the spheres take up ~74.05% of the space vs the space between the sphere (see the Kepler conjecture). This predicts a maximum expansive constant (dark energy) of on each of these universes of ~74%

http://hubblesite.org/hubble_discoveries...energy.php

We do know this: Since space is everywhere, this dark energy force is everywhere, and its effects increase as space expands. In contrast, gravity's force is stronger when things are close together and weaker when they are far apart. Because gravity is weakening with the expansion of space, dark energy now makes up over 2/3 of all the energy in the universe.

It sounds rather strange that we have no firm idea about what makes up 74% of the universe. It's as though we had explored all the land on the planet Earth and never in all our travels encountered an ocean. But now that we've caught sight of the waves, we want to know what this huge, strange, powerful entity really is.



Later on in the model, the internal geometry divides for 6 individual space-time regions of which our region (which patterns for the lightest type of quarks) is only one. This affects the original 74%. 74.05 divided by 6 equals ~ 12.34.  That takes out the influence of our region which leaves 61.71 influence from the other 5 regions, a lower DE constant. The creation of matter in this model is a quantum tunneling "white hole" like event that erupts across the space of all 6 regions simultaneously and these are the cores of galaxies. This is also like a pressure equalization event and settles out near the mean between the upper and lower DE limits. It would settle somewhere just above the mean as the fabric of space-time closes back together behind the white hole event.

The mean between 74.05 and 61.71 is 67.88....less that .5% below modern/revised estimates of 68.3% DE expansive constant.

The arrangement of the 6 spaces geometrically predict 3 density levels of quarks and their anti-quarks. As in the standard model of particle generation.

The first internal simultaneous geometry of space-time in a universe is derived from the spatial relationships an extant infinite has with itself. No matter if it's hyper dense quark matter, or limitless Limburger cheese, or an undefined quantum nothing the same relationships exist: All around itself equally in all directions, at the center of itself everywhere, and equally distributed as a field.
This quantizes into a sphere around a point (much smaller solid sphere) with a tensor field in equilibrium between them.

If this is the vibrational "macro-container" that is the universe, it predicts the behavior and micro-structure of the atom.  They are the internal waves this shape container of the universe predicts. Here's how: The quantum tunneling event referred to above is the inversion point of the universal waveform into micro particle expression. Inverting the universal sphere/field/point "holon" yields a larger spherical component at the center with a much smaller point like particle flying around in a probability field creating a discrete border condition. Atoms are stable and ordered because the universe is stable and ordered.


The shape of our region of space time unfolded by this model is a rings torus and predicts a negative or saddle shaped curvature of space-time.

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news...dle-shaped

The geometry of the universe is "open" or negatively curved like a saddle, according to a new model proposed by researchers in Europe who have studied anomalies in the cosmic microwave background radiation. The anomalies were first detected by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) in 2004 and were confirmed earlier this year by the European Space Agency's Planck space mission.

A torus in motion around our bubble of observability (observable universe) would cause a hemispherical divide of the CMB as on side is traveling towards you giving stronger readings and one side is traveling away giving weaker readings.  If there is also six fold internal division of universe spaces, there might be remnants on the CMB of both these features.


http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/03/i...opsided/2/


And now a little something on the consideration of these things from the University of Oregon Physics department. http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/ast123/lectures/lec17.html

Physics of the early Universe is at the boundary of astronomy and philosophy since we do not currently have a complete theory that unifies all the fundamental forces of Nature at the moment of Creation. In addition, there is no possibility of linking observation or experimentation of early Universe physics to our theories (i.e. it's not possible to `build' another Universe). Our theories are rejected or accepted based on simplicity and aesthetic grounds, plus their power of prediction to later times, rather than an appeal to empirical results. This is a very difference way of doing science from previous centuries of research.

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You appear to be telling us what any potential universe would be like, and that you have a model for it. How do you know any of this is true? We have one data point. You're making assumptions that other universes must be follow a bunch of rules similar to the ones this one has. Your "falsifiable criteria" is based on modelling this universe and comparing it against itself, as far as I can see. We can't retest it. This universe fits your criteria. Can I perform any additional tests that could actually falsify it? Just recounting the same data you already decided fits your model is not another test.