(February 27, 2015 at 11:33 am)Faith No More Wrote: Given the way you've talked about your past, it appears that the temptation to have a cure to your perceived existential crisis was at least equally responsible for your conversion…As convincing as you may have found any argument, I don't think you can deny there were heavy emotional factors at play, can you?Isn’t it always the case that people’s emotions push them forward? I did have an existential crisis, but that resulted in me acknowledging the cognative dissidence between my religion (UCC) and my tacit atheism. I had already made peace with my mortality. I enjoyed the thought of existential freedom of defining my own meaning. Basically, I lost all ties to Christianity so the only thing that remained was to be intellectually honest about it. Like many deconverts have expressed, I felt as if a burden had been lifted. I remember the exact moment it happened. But I did have some outstanding issues that nagged at me. I found it disturbing that all the secular theories of ethics of which I knew could not avoid the conclusion that “might makes right” and I kept puzzling over the mind-body problem. I also had gnostic experiences that are extremely difficult to square with materialism.
The comments suggesting I must continue to “question my faith” not reasonable. The point I was making was that I already have and that is why I am not an Evangelical. As I continue to tap the vein of the whole Western philosophical tradition, I do not actively try to refute my current understanding. I simply keep learning about the things that interest me. If some ideas just so happen to contradict my current beliefs then I will weight those ideas it on their merit, just as I did before I became an atheist. For example, I recently I finished a book by Freke called ‘The Jesus Mysteries’ and found some of his ideas interesting and some less than convincing. There are certain Christian beliefs that I no longer hold, like propitiatory atonement. If someone confronts me, I have no problem giving them a fair hearing. But on my own initiative, I’m not about to go on rehashing ideas that, to my mind, have already been settled and which no longer interest me.
