RE: Is atheism a liberating and good experience?
December 3, 2012 at 5:43 am
(This post was last modified: December 3, 2012 at 5:59 am by Norfolk And Chance.)
(December 2, 2012 at 11:55 pm)naimless Wrote: Hello, you voluptuous ragamuffins,
I was watching a lot of Richard Dawkins videos on YouTube recently. He says many things that I find impossible to disagree with. I'm sure you all have had similar experiences, perhaps with Hitchens, maybe even Hicks, Carlin...
Nevertheless, one thing Dawkins mentions is receiving messages from people thanking him for liberating them. Indeed, it baffles me how he sees atheism as a good thing for somebody who had faith to discover.
I am an atheist because it is the most harsh and universal truth I've found, not because it is a good or liberating experience. Indeed, my most euphoric and liberating experience came from believing in karma and Buddhist philosophy utilising things like meditation and lucid dreams (around the age of 15-17).
Even up to around the age of 10 I was raised Christian and happy that I had a higher power in stages 1-2 of Dawkins' scale. As I am now nearing stage 7, quite frankly I can't sleep at night, I don't eat properly, I don't exercise enough any more, I have panic attacks, pains in my neck, migraines, flashing vision etc. and I have little self-esteem or genuine feeling of empathy or compassion for others.
Honestly the main thoughts that go through my head now are, "if I had a gun, I could blow my head off".
All it seems to me that you are saying is that not believing in god makes you unhappy, which of course daniel loves...
No easy solution here and I suspect you are thinking of going back to religion to soothe your fears. Maybe you should if you are so weak minded, you'll find plenty of equally scared and weak minded individuals there who you can identify with.
But you already know, that's not going to make any of it true.
Nobody ever said the truth of a matter has to be palatable.
(December 3, 2012 at 2:17 am)naimless Wrote: Err to find someone else that isn't liberated by it.
No, but it'd be cool to know I ain't alone in what I feel.
OK, I can't say that atheism has been a "liberating" experience for me either but I am what I am and that is an absolute non believer, in fact I'm very, very anti-religion these days. There is just no way that this bullshit is true, no way, and even if I felt that believing it would make me happier I couldn't do it.
Fortunately I'm in a good place mentally and within my life. I know my place in society and within my family, I'm satisfied with my lot. I realise I've only got one shot and could die at any time, live each day as well as you can.
But was becoming atheist liberating? Or Euphoric? Nah, can't say it was. I wasn't brought up with religion rammed down my throat, didn't go to church, was only really exposed at school, and frankly by the time I was 9 or 10, I just couldn't accept it and knew I didn't believe. I didn't feel euphoric about it, I felt scared. Scared that the reality was I was going to die one day, stay dead forever and not even know that I even lived. Scared that people could do anything they liked with no devine retribution...let's face it, people if they are bad will take their chance avoiding the human justice system...but WHY DO WE even have a justice system at all? Because deep down we all KNOW it's BULLSHIT, and that NO FUCKER is going to hell no matter what they've done, so we better make sure they pay in this life.
Oops, went off on a tangent there.
You are currently experiencing a lucky and very brief window of awareness, sandwiched in between two periods of timeless and utter nothingness. So why not make the most of it, and stop wasting your life away trying to convince other people that there is something else? The reality is obvious.
