Former atheist

[Faith No More]

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.

Yes, emotions are always the driving factor, but sometimes they cause us to perceive certain conclusions as more valid than they truly are due to the emotional benefit those conclusions can provide. We're psychologically driven to come to conclusions that have emotional benefit, and that causes our reasoning to become highly flawed when emotions are heavily prevalent.

My point was that given your pension for pining about how devoid and existentially vapid atheism leaves a person, saying that you were convinced merely on a rational level by theistic arguments is a gross over-simplification.