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

[Whateverist]

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.

I suspect you are right about that.  I feel intuitively that what we are is not exclusively up to us.  But as creatures with the capacity for reason and accustomed to encoding understanding in symbolic language it can easily come to feel that way.  So I find I'm fairly immune to feelings of despair over the isolation inherent in the human condition.  No magic required.  Just an openness to the what more there is within without rushing to judgement.