RE: Atheists ONLY - Are you less happy now that you are an atheist?
November 20, 2013 at 1:36 pm
I was always a very happy and optimistic person, able to view life through a "half full" prism. That didn't change when I stopped being religious and when I stopped believing in god. Whereas I used to focus on the good things about being religious before, I just as easily focus on the good things about being free of religious belief now. Whereas I used to minimize the negative aspects of religion and belief, I minimize the negative aspects of the lack of either.
We are who we are. I admit I don't know where I got my sunny outlook from. My mother raised us, and she is a very pessimistic and "half empty" kind of person. She always has been. Finding god did not change her as a person. Losing god did not change me. The events that have shaped me the most in my (recent) life did not involve religion or god.
We are who we are. I admit I don't know where I got my sunny outlook from. My mother raised us, and she is a very pessimistic and "half empty" kind of person. She always has been. Finding god did not change her as a person. Losing god did not change me. The events that have shaped me the most in my (recent) life did not involve religion or god.
"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
