(February 13, 2017 at 10:29 am)Rhondazvous Wrote: For those of you who have a history in a particular religion and moved away from it, I mean do you ever miss the feeling of believing you had a personal relationship with god?
A few weeks ago, to my surprise, I went through a period of nostalgia. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Twenty-five years of indoctrination and programing in fear and guilt, joy and gratitude don’t just go away just because I realize intellectually that Christianity isn’t true.
If I shared those feelings and the dreams I used to have of being left in the rapture with a Christian, they will have an explanation for it. This is why indoctrination is so important in religion. We’re programmed with the strongest emotions and religionists know the feelings won’t go away—not permanently. All it takes is a trigger, a song, a memory. Then the Christians can say aha, in your heart of hearts you know god exists. And if I don’t know better, I’ll have to believe their interpretation of what I feel.
But I do know better and I resent being played with. To program me to believe something and then use that programming as proof of my belief is disingenuous. Of course, now they can interpret my resentment as proof that I hate god.
Yes, absolutely; I miss religious faith and the emotional and mental comforts very, very much, especially, the comfort of an afterlife.
But, it's not real, at least by the standards that we judge everything else in life. Look at this way (which, I got from another source online -- just google it): You have gotten arrested, convicted and sentenced to prison (or death) for a crime that you did commit. Now, you may be (understandably) angry and blame the police for the way they treated you, the jury who convicted you, the trial judge who sentenced you, the prison guards who guard you, etc., etc. But, are you going to invent some fantasy that you are not going to go to prison, death row, etc., just because you find the fact of prison and/or being executed to be unpleasant? Only mentally ill people do that, or sane persons who are trying to fake a mental illness. Nearly everyone else faces reality for what it is. The "alternative" (and, there isn't one for sane people) is to invent an alternate reality for which there is absolutely no evidence.
Religion and/or religious faith are just as silly.
