(September 22, 2018 at 4:20 pm)Thoreauvian Wrote:(September 22, 2018 at 4:39 am)Dragonfly Wrote: I just came to this realization tonight, and I feel absolutely devastated and lost. I'm a 50-year-old woman who's spent her life making choices based on religion. There is no God to comfort me, guide me, protect me, or intervene in my life. There is no Heaven. I will never see my family, friends, or pets again once they/I die. My entire schema for living has fallen apart. I feel devastated and terrified.
I was also 50 when my God-concept finally fell apart, and I became an atheist later that year after I read The God Delusion. To tell you the truth, the end wasn't the hard part for me. It was the prior seven years when I had become estranged from other people who held the same beliefs. That was the difficult time for me.
Once I started reading books on atheism and posting at the Amazon atheist forum (which is now gone), the clouds cleared away. After that, I never felt better. Most of my fears and obsessions were left-overs from unreasonable religious ideas, which I quickly dropped. It's like throwing away crutches which you really don't need anymore.
Glad to know I'm not the only one who only figured this out in midlife. I think it's going to be a long process to deprogram myself. I'm in a support group for those trying to leave fundamentalist religion, and it seems like most of them are atheists. I also go to a Skeptics group. I hope I can do without the crutches eventually. I think it's going to take a while. The God of Old Testament has always been capricious and petty.
(September 22, 2018 at 4:29 pm)Wololo Wrote:(September 22, 2018 at 4:39 am)Dragonfly Wrote: Hello,
I was raised in an evangelical Christian fundamentalist home. Fourteen years ago I couldn't take it anymore but couldn't stand the feeling of being "nothing," and Judaism seemed to be a much kinder, truer religion, so I astonished my family by converting to Judaism. I fell away from Judaism over the years, got very religious again a couple of months ago, but just couldn't get anything out of it. Since Rosh Hashanah a couple of weeks ago, I really started searching. I talked with a rabbi, visited a church again and felt totally disillusioned. I've spent countless hours in the last week studying atheism, creationism, religion, philosophy, science, cosmology, evolution, myth, etc., and one by one my beliefs broke. Evolution happened, the world wasn't created in six days, the Big Bang happened, there is no God. I've been hanging onto a delusion out of fear.
I just came to this realization tonight, and I feel absolutely devastated and lost. I'm a 50-year-old woman who's spent her life making choices based on religion. There is no God to comfort me, guide me, protect me, or intervene in my life. There is no Heaven. I will never see my family, friends, or pets again once they/I die. My entire schema for living has fallen apart. I feel devastated and terrified.
If you have any guidance, please help me.
thanks,
dragonfly
Firstly I'm sorry for your troubles, I never felt the kind of anguish about death that you described (maybe because I gave up religion when I was too young to go up against many Sicilians when death was on the line), so I can't tell you anything to help alleviate it, as I don't have a fear of death.
But I do have a general piece of advice; find something good that you like doing. It doesn't have to be big, like finding a cure for cancer, but if you can find something that regularly leaves the world a bit better when you got to sleep at night than when you woke up that morning (or once a week or month or whatever you can spare), you'll have done a great thing. And because you like doing it, you'll have the added bonus of feeling happy into the bargain.
Ok, I will do that. Thank you!
