I think I have to explain my question. I started to analyze some of my beliefs after having read the thread “rational/irrational discussion”. I believe in some facts because I have been given enough evidence, and some just seem plausible (no afterlife…), but some other, including this last one, seem to carry a high emotional charge (can you say that in English?, I use that expression a lot at work (child psychiatry)) and I just “can’t help myself”! (for example the belief there’s no intelligent design, no immortal soul…)
- I’ve been an atheist as long as I can remember, based on my experiences of the world around me at first, reasoning and reading when I grew up.
- my first book on atheism was Michel Onfray “Traité d’athéologie” (I think it has been translated in English it’s really an excellent book !). I liked it so much I used to carry it with me for some time as a talisman (I was a lonely atheist in my teens…), and I got the same feeling with “the God delusion”, I just finished reading, and “the miracle of life” a book by Albert Jaccard (a biologist) I read when I was a teenager.
- Some of the arguments of theses books convinced me but some other parts left me with an awe-like feeling and I just “felt” : this must be true !
- I know how emotion can guide and transform our interpretation of facts and events. And I suspect I agree with some ideas based on the fact that given my personality, I « like » them. As if I « liked believing » in them for emotional, esthetical, or other complex reasons.
- So I must have a masochistic trait and a melodramatic one because I find the idea of several billions of humans trapped on the surface of a carbon-etc sphere in the great emptiness of space struggling with trivial miseries of life and great metaphysical questions but with the same emotional density, so beautiful and moving... Tragi-comical sometimes, but awfully touching…
So am I not different than the deists apart for the fact that given my psychological structure and my personality I don’t “like” the same ideas that they do? Is atheism my “religion” and my “ideology”?
Not for all the proven facts of course but all the other ones?
Meow?
- I’ve been an atheist as long as I can remember, based on my experiences of the world around me at first, reasoning and reading when I grew up.
- my first book on atheism was Michel Onfray “Traité d’athéologie” (I think it has been translated in English it’s really an excellent book !). I liked it so much I used to carry it with me for some time as a talisman (I was a lonely atheist in my teens…), and I got the same feeling with “the God delusion”, I just finished reading, and “the miracle of life” a book by Albert Jaccard (a biologist) I read when I was a teenager.
- Some of the arguments of theses books convinced me but some other parts left me with an awe-like feeling and I just “felt” : this must be true !
- I know how emotion can guide and transform our interpretation of facts and events. And I suspect I agree with some ideas based on the fact that given my personality, I « like » them. As if I « liked believing » in them for emotional, esthetical, or other complex reasons.
- So I must have a masochistic trait and a melodramatic one because I find the idea of several billions of humans trapped on the surface of a carbon-etc sphere in the great emptiness of space struggling with trivial miseries of life and great metaphysical questions but with the same emotional density, so beautiful and moving... Tragi-comical sometimes, but awfully touching…
So am I not different than the deists apart for the fact that given my psychological structure and my personality I don’t “like” the same ideas that they do? Is atheism my “religion” and my “ideology”?
Not for all the proven facts of course but all the other ones?
Meow?
