RE: How do you deal with life now that you are an atheist? (With a little of my life)
August 30, 2016 at 4:31 pm
(This post was last modified: August 30, 2016 at 4:35 pm by 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.
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.
