RE: Still struggling.
February 12, 2016 at 11:13 pm
(This post was last modified: February 13, 2016 at 12:58 am by God of Mr. Hanky.)
(February 12, 2016 at 10:00 pm)GeneralDog Wrote: Things were going great earlier today. Now I had a though "What if this is just a phase?". I had a small bit of anxiety and tried to tell myself "Just reason things out and you will be fine, no one else I know (Besides my brother but he did at a different time) converted to atheism and back. Just use logic." I just got some doubt and I'm having a hard time ignoring the doubt.
What doubt?
The way you keep applying that word to atheism looks almost as if you are addressing atheism like some set of ideas and doctrines, just like the religion you say you want to leave behind, but atheism is nothing of the sort to which that word is applicable. Atheism is simply the default which one arrives at when you see no valid reasons to believe in a god. No deity, no holy book, and no doctrines = nothing to doubt. Which is why "doubt" is the issue of the theist who tries to live by the doctrines which he has been taught to believe, when confronted by the hard light of reality (too bad for him that he doesn't realize this isn't a problem, and that dealing with said reality is the best road to making better decisions).
If you really want people to reaffirm your "faith" to allay your "doubt" in atheism, it doesn't work that way. But if you are really interested in unpacking the truth on theistic ideas, then go back and look real hard at those ideas and ask yourself why you ever first believed in them (same reason as any brainwashed toddler), why you continued to reaffirm those ideas among peers and adults even when they were really starting to look like nonsense, and what were the reasons why you stopped believing in them (presuming that happened). That is how people become atheist - not from the atheist community offering better ideas (although they may admire science and philosophy), but because their evaluations of the ideas which you doubt are the most honest.
Oh, not sure if anyone's mentioned it on this thread, but reading your bible without the tinted glasses is the surest way to clear up the infection of the doctrines which were pulled from it. Read it all, evaluate what it says as a model for morality in human society, and don't make excuses for what you see when it offends you! There is a very good reason why a book which is thousands of years old should not be regarded as the perfect answer to all future generations as society evolves, and this is because the moral philosophy expressed in the bible is no better than the mortal swine "prophets" who wrote it! It's a truly horrible excuse for a moral code to be applied in modern society because it was written before our nearly universally-shared modern ideas (such as non-tolerance of rape and slavery) changed our humanity for the better, and this means that there could not have been any decent god who would have "inspired" the writing of that shit!
If you are in the bible-reading sectarian culture (I know Catholics tend to leave that to their priests), then you have probably seen a few offensive stories such as Lot's daughter being abandoned by her father in a deal he cut with a band of gang-rapists, or "Slaves, obey your masters", and every such case is spun clean from the pulpit to the audience which is willing to believe it's clean and holy, but the next time you see that being so done ask for evidence. If instead of producing hard evidence such as historical corroboration which is not theistically motivated instead of argument, which they will invariably do because it's all they know how to do, then demand empirical data - then you can enjoy watching Pulpit Suit founder! Oh, what was it again that you had doubts of?
Mr. Hanky loves you!