(May 11, 2018 at 3:15 pm)Hammy Wrote: There's also the parallel reverse hypothetical for atheists like myself... "How would you feel if you became a theist?/went back to theism and how would the change to theism impact your life overall?" (atheists are welcome to answer this).
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If I became a Christian again, the way it would affect me would depend on if I was 'regressing' back to how I was when I used to be a Christian - before I developed an interest in psychology and the brain - OR starting from my current mindset...
If I was regressing back to my old state, the main differences I think would be in my mindset: I'd be more hopeful, positive, and resilient than I am now as an atheist. Mainly because of the notion of God's Will and prayer; I'd have an extra person/being to talk to and that was very comforting when I was a Christian. Prayer provided hope and comfort regardless of the outcome because of God's Will. In a way, my current Clockwork Universe thinking is pretty similar in the sense that I can still hope and question 'what will be' but the difference is, prayer gives voice to those hopes/questions, and the expectation that those hopes/questions alone will affect what will be and even if the answer is not what you hoped for or expected, it can still be thought of as for the greater good... God's Will... which is all very comforting.
If on the other hand I was becoming a Christian in my current mindset, then a lot of the above would be impossible for me... prayer and everything else would all have to be approached very differently, given my views on psychology etc. I no longer think in terms of hope for the future in that sort of way... not usually anyway; for instance, I kind of fell off the wagon in that regard a bit yesterday; on a whim I decided to buy a scratchcard for old time's sake and quickly got into a state of hope that I would win. That sort of hopeful state is a nice feeling and almost worth preserving in its own right... in the sense of putting a scratchcard aside rather than ever actually scratching it... as a hope for the future. It's very easy to get into a state of hopeful expectation like that, but a nice feeling is all it is... a flight of fancy with no bearing on reality; the card has already been printed and no amount of internal case-building of why I could, should, or deserve to win has any bearing on those already printed numbers. And for the sake of this hypothetical... that I had become a Christian again... I would still find it very hard to reconcile God's Will with free will, or affecting a causal chain like the scratchcard; eg if it wins, it either won all along or it is changed in some way to win... if it is changed then if that change is isolated there will be no record of it in the system as it were (or generalised to no record of it in the causal chain)... but if there is a record of it, then the causal chain has to have been affected to some degree, and some way along the line that's going to cause conflicts or bump into free will. So that is something I cannot reconcile.
So, apart from the occasional fall off the wagon like the above... one which I kicked myself afterwards for - £2 wasted on a fleeting hope... my current worldview does not seek comfort in that sort of hope. So I don't know how I would approach Christianity from my current mindset if I was to go there again. All I do know is, that in any of my quests for comfort these days, they do not come from seeking comfort in false hope or the feelings of hope themselves but rather in accepting reality... so in those times I lean towards Buddhism and other similar philosophies (only the philosophy of it... not the religious/superstitious aspects), rather than something like Christianity. That is, lean towards accepting suffering in the present rather than hoping for something in the future.
