(March 17, 2015 at 12:30 am)WastedLife Wrote: Has anyone who has lost their belief gone back to church, temple, whatever and found that not only is there nothing there anymore but it's as if your eyes have been opened wide and you see everything as it is rather than through the religion-tinted specs you wore when you regularly attended.My loss of faith was gradual, it took several years before I finally admitted to myself that I was an atheist. So for me there wasn't the sudden epiphany and the attempt to recover something lost, only to find that it couldn't be recovered. By the time I finally accepted that there were no gods, the old rationalizations and presuppositions had long ago fallen away. The best part is that I never had to go through that experience of teasing myself to see if there was anything left; I had no reason to try.
Occasionally I will read or hear someone talking about the stuff I believed in, and it certainly sounds different now that I am hearing it without the 'Jesus filter.' But that's to be expected. When the veil drops, nothing can possibly seem the same.
"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
