(September 19, 2013 at 6:47 pm)Zazzy Wrote: Can you explain more about what this was like? I was raised by atheists and never even flirted with a god, so I don't understand it. For those of you who have been on both sides- what's it like to have that moral certainty? What's it like to lose it?
It feels like any other belief that you are sure of. For many years I had no problem shrugging off counter-arguments. When you are convinced of a position and have ways of dismissing counter-arguments or tough questions, it is quite easy to maintain a firm hold on your beliefs.
As I've said before, my faith slowly came apart because I was driven to prove that my beliefs were perfectly plausible and compatible with modern day understanding of the world. You could say that it was my mistake to do so, but I was confident that I could do it because god was real and the Bible was his divine word. Oh well, you can see how that turned out.
Deconverting was not a painful process for me because it was so drawn out and marked more by apathy than anything else. By the time I sat down and admitted to myself that I was an atheist, I had long ago become one. Admitting it was probably the toughest part, and it wasn't very difficult at all.
"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
