RE: Greetings
January 7, 2019 at 4:30 pm
(This post was last modified: January 7, 2019 at 4:32 pm by Brian37.)
(January 3, 2019 at 3:00 pm)alw0992 Wrote: Hello,
My name is Anthony. I live in a small town in Texas around 45 miles southwest of Ft. Worth. I work for an oil field company as a admin assistant. Graduated with a degree in psychology and have an unfinished master in criminal justice. Old career was working as a guard at a juvenile detention center. As far as my faith background, raised a Christian in the Baptist tradition. I nave no sad stories about my religious up-bringing, my family was fairly relaxed but extremely faithful at the same time. I began to question religion around my late teens and going into college, nothing ground breaking but researching Buddhism (from a philosophical standpoint) opening my worldview up a little bit. Then I started doing Biblical and religious research from a secular viewpoint and I began viewing Christianity from a different mindset and began questioning major doctrine. Now that I'm older, I'm more and more skeptical of religious dogma; mainly after becoming involved in Celebrate Recovery. I wouldn't call myself an unbeliever, but I can be lumped in with skepticism. I'm on the threshold, sort to speak, but I'm still holding on to a couple of beliefs; I'm sure out of a subconscious need for comfort.
You said it, "Comfort" is really every religion in the world in human history has been.
Once you accept the age of the planet as being 4 billion years old, knowing it has had 5 mass extinction events in that time, and knowing in that time our current form of species has only been around an estimated 2 or 300 thousand years, and knowing that the universe is 13.8 billion years old and knowing there are an estimated 2 trillion galaxies in our observable universe, the claim that this one speck of a rock in a remote outpost, means that a sky wizard has us as a species in mind is absurd.
I have comfort myself as an atheist. I am comforted by the fact that I am alive now, and comforted by the knowledge that even with all the natural disasters, and even with all the human conflict, my species always has the potential to be compassionate, not that we always are.
I have no desire for a fictional forever. Just like I don't fear my life before I was born. Life is both good and bad, and nothing lasts forever. All I can do now is live, and be non violent and value common law and human rights. But I do not need faith in old mythology or invisible beings.
