(April 25, 2013 at 12:21 pm)Bohook24 Wrote: My question is how do I go about this decinversion process? How do get rid of these morals and fear of hell that have been branded upon me? What do I do?
I'm not sure which morals you refer to, but I wouldn't rush to get rid of them. Think about what you believe and why, then reason it out. Ask questions, find answers, then investigate the answers. Don't expect it to be a journey with an end-- that kind of thinking is what religion tries to burn into your skull. It's okay to acknowledge that you don't know something for sure, or that you don't have an answer to a particular question or dilemma.
Fear of hell? I find that we each have a fairly large core of beliefs that our subconscious mind accepts uncritically, which affects our thoughts and our behavior. Religious beliefs are often part of this core of unquestioned claims, which can make it very difficult to get past them. You may think that you are questioning those beliefs, but you aren't, and you'll have to force yourself to in order to understand why they make you afraid.
Take careful note of many of the arguments that theists make, and you may eventually come to recognize the core beliefs that they think they question but which they accept uncritically. Find those beliefs in your own mind and work to get rid of them; unquestioned beliefs are useless and tend to work against us.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
