What was it like being an atheist?

[jstrodel]

I used to be an atheist, I was pretty miserable.

One of these things hasn't changed.

I am not miserable now. I spend several hours a day meditating on the Christian faith and sharing with others. I promise you that I get great joy from it, I never feel frustrated, I feel a deep sense of groundedness and peace in my soul, my doubts are gone, the problems I used to see in religion I have overcome.

I am happy whenever I think about God, because I feel such a sense of freedom inside of me to challenge ideas and the more I challenge them, the more I learn.

Atheism is so dreary intellectually, there is no beauty or joy, you have to make everything up. Atheism is so painful.

Materialism is so painful.

I used to listen to music 20 or 30 hours a week. It felt like everything was so meaningless, so empty. Everything seems like a joke, everything is absurd. I think that is what hell is like, feeling like that, everything is a joke, there is no sense of respect attached to anything, there is no sense of love, everything is like a joke.

Everything is like a joke, because philosophically that is the condition of a world where nothing is intrinsically valuable, everything is hollow. That is the post modern condition, a sort of hallow materialism, a reflection on a reflection of nothing.

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I used to be an atheist, I was pretty miserable. I thought that there was no free will. Life was totally meaningless. I didn't see any values or reason to live. I didn't have anything to constrain my actions. I was miserable and depressed all the time.

Being depressed, doing drugs, alcohol and not going to church, or being mad at a god that's not there does not make you an atheist.

I used to take the ideas fairly seriously that God does not exist. I had some lingering doubts about maybe God exists, because I had had thing happen to me where I felt that God could be responsible. But I didn't pursue it because I wanted to keep sinning.