Reasons for being an Atheist

[Angrboda]

I'm of the opinion that people change as a result of context and cognition resulting in emotional experience that provides the motivation for changing. A common example is that in therapy, it is not uncommon for the therapist to attempt to help a client become more aware of how a specific pattern of behavior is resulting in recurrent unpleasant emotions as a consequence of the behavior. This may be brought about by helping the patient develop insight about the relationship between the behavior and the emotional consequences or perhaps by simply helping them identify the behavior itself as a pattern, or approaching some other angle of the client's understanding of the behavior and the consequences. This helps to focus awareness of the emotional cost of the behavior, as well as helping the patient visualize possible alternatives to the behavior. If a client is guided to an increased awareness of how codependent behaviors are contributing to her unhappiness, her unhappiness and "existential anxiety" about the continuance of such patterns can motivate her to change her behavior. In such a situation, emotion is driving the effort to change, but the choice itself and the reasons for desiring the change are rational and justifiable. I suspect questions of belief may be similar, in that it requires emotional impetus to fuel the actual process of change. When theists (or atheists) refer to believing or disbelieving for emotional reasons, I think they generally implicitly mean as an irrational response to an emotional event or experience, and exclude the possibility that emotional reactions can be sensible and rational, dependent on the context. Emotion is an essential part of reasoning and decision making, and there's a tendency to avoid acknowledging the emotional aspects because it is often viewed as implying a lack of rationality to the actions and decisions. Unfortunately, perhaps, atheists have a tendency to be more vulnerable to the loaded and somewhat biased nature of the suggestion from theists because, in general, they are often encouraged to elevate the value of rationality, and devalue that of emotion. Unfortunately, that bias, combined with a loaded question, can result in unnecessary difficulty in formulating a reasoned response to the question.

Oddly enough, perhaps emotion is involved there as well, as the atheist is reluctant to go down avenues where they might experience their position as a nonbeliever as vulnerable to shameful or embarrassing accusations of unreasonableness, made all the more acute by the general atheist/rationalist trend to avoid being seen as being influenced by emotion rather than reason, because of their polarized valuation of the two mental resources.