Hello, New atheist having a meltdown

[The Grand Nudger]

I'm feeling like the delusion helped me cope with the permanent nature of death a lot. Now I'm terribly depressed about not seeing them again. When relatives I love died, I was crushed by the loss, but still it was very comforting to think that I would see them again. I hung onto that hope. I still grieved, but it was for my loss, not theirs, as I thought they were in a blissful place where they felt nothing but joy. I've seen people of faith go through the Kubler-Ross model of grieving, and rather than be stuck in denial, they have gone through the whole process, but aided by their delusion. That's not to say that some don't get stuck. 

Well...sure, same for me.  The dead feel no pain.  The loss can only be mine.  It can only be those who one day survive me.  

Right now I'm torn because of what I feel that I've discovered about the world--that God doesn't exist--and the fact that I'm really not doing well with this realization. While it is/was a delusion, I functioned better in many ways with it. It didn't fully satisfy, no, because I often felt like I was praying to nothing. But there was always some measure of hope and comfort the delusion brought. 

If life, just life itself... were truly devoid of hope and comfort in the absence of gods.. then we wouldn't have survived long enough to make up the god of your childhood in the first place.  You don't have practice separating the divine from the mundane..when it comes to hope..yet.  That will change.  You're clearly a survivor, half a century speaks to the point.  

I am someone who has always had issues with anxiety, depression, and obsession. I wonder if I am psychologically strong enough to handle the truth and live without a belief in God and Heaven. I find myself wanting to claw my way back to religion--a "safe" place where there were perhaps easy answers to my questions, but they were answers that offered some measure of comfort. Now the unanswered questions and belief in the finite nature of life feel oppressive almost beyond toleration. I constantly rock when I sit or lie in bed. I don't want to get out of bed. I have headaches and am constantly sick to my stomach and running to the bathroom. I keep having these desperate thoughts that maybe I can somehow believe in evolution, the Big Bang, and that these thousands of other myths existed, but that there's still some kind of God out there? Yet I've opened Pandora's box. If I could somehow regain some semblance of belief in God, it would be even less satisfying than it was as I would constantly be reminded of the arguments against God's existence. 

You -can- believe in all of that concurrently.  You just don't..at least not at present.  I'm an antitheist, my wife is a full on christer.  We don't disagree on evolution, or cosmology.  She's an educated woman, lol.  One of the things she loves about me is how many myths I know..how I can tell them all to our kids.  How I can sell them, hard.

Despite my rationally not believing in God, I'm also having psychological abuse from my childhood surfacing. I think things like "now you've committed the unpardonable sin [by not believing], and at the Judgment when you die, Jesus will say 'I never knew you; depart from me,' and then I will be thrown in Hell. And another thought that "whoever denies me before men, I will also deny him before my Father in heaven." In short, all of my toxic, religious crap is surfacing even though my rational brain says it's not true. 

I guess I am having a breakdown. I have immense respect for all of you who are functioning so well in your unbelief. You're apparently much stronger than I am. I don't know how/if I will get through this.

Well..jesus will tell many christians™ that they never knew him, and he never knew them.  That's who he was talking to..explicitly, in that passage in magic book.  Not non believers.  If there really is a good god, and jesus is that god...abusers have to be the target of that ire, not the abused, not the confused..not those lied to so egregiously they fall out of a false and pretentious faith.

I want to stress again that I'm -not- stronger..that was the point of sharing all of that with you.  You and I are the same, in this.  I've had alot of different reactions, and seen alot of them.  I'm certainly not proud of all of them..and I haven't always dealt with it well.  Now..sure, environmental differences.  I was never a believer.  I'm desensitized to death to an extent by service (at the same time i have guilt related to death not accounted for by loss or natural circumstance).....but underneath it all is just another person like you.  I cry.

You're gonna be fine.  So what if your ex boyfriend talks shit to his dad about you..ultimately?  Is that the kind of good god stuff you're supposed to bow down to?  Is that the prince of mercy speaking, or just another jilted asshole putting words into his mouth about a girl who didn't want to go to the prom with him?





I don't know...day to day, whether I'll get through this, either.  Then I wake up and it's another day.  Life can be sad.  So sad...but that's not all that life is, or can be.  I'm sure I don't need to tell you that.  You know.