The need to believe?

[mordant]

my grandmother died a little over two years ago, and when she became ill, I was an atheist at that time, and it was then that I started to feel emotionally lost as an non-believer. Logically, atheism was still ''it'' for me, but emotionally, dealing with the loss of my grandmother was just hard.

I think it may come down to styles of relating to and coping with one's reality. I was recruited into evangelical Christianity three months shy of my sixth birthday at an after-school "good news club". Despite my young age, I remember quite clearly that it was presented to me, and accepted as, a logical proposition (except that my younger self, of course, could not see the logical fallacies I was buying into). I was a sinner, god offered free forgiveness for the asking, why wouldn't I take it? It was not an emotional moment. It was just a believed offer that it seemed to me at the time was dumb not to take up.

In the ensuing years, I attended church, learned all the doctrines, and after high school even attended a Bible Institute in the midwest. I was active in volunteer work at church, running their media and playing the organ for services, etc.

My eventual exit from the faith, which got underway in earnest in my mid-twenties, was equally heady in nature. I married at 19, with no clearer notion of what marital success entailed than that I should marry "a good Christian girl" and all would be well. Unfortunately my good Christian girl took a sharp left turn into severe mental illness. Fifteen years and two children later that marriage fell apart. I remarried and the 2nd time around I ended up widowed. Somewhere in there my mother and a close friend also died in separate car accidents and my oldest brother, an elder of his church, died of an unexplained aggressive cancer. Through this period of my life I came to realize that religious faith is a failed epistemology that does not lead towards truth, and does not explain or predict experienced reality. I left the faith for the same reasons I joined it: as a child, becoming a Christian relieved the mild cognitive dissonance of fearing god's punishment; deconverting was a matter of escaping the cognitive dissonance that prayer was indistinguishable in practice from random happenstance, the promises of god were indistinguishable from wishful thinking, and my dogma of choice did not explain or predict experienced reality. Also, my religious faith had clearly not prepared me for the Real World, which is not always the friendly and comprehensible place my faith had suggested it was: believe in god, obey him, be kind and good, and all will ultimately be well. Things were not well for me. At. All.

You on the other hand, whether through good luck or youth or both (I'm 60 now), as well as through being perhaps a less heady person than I, have found faith mostly a comfort thus far. Also, unlike me, you haven't been forced to face down the fact of mortality as much as I have. How would you have responded to your grandmother's death if you had never been an atheist and always a Christian? Rather than missing the faux comfort of the faith, you would have had to deal with the useless "why" questions: why grandma, why now, what did she / I do to deserve this, why did she suffer. All of these assume an intelligent agent who has claims on you and grandma and must be appeased or pleased or at least not pissed off.  Now assume it wasn't grandma, but mom, or a young sister or niece, or a fiance or spouse, who hasn't had the opportunity to live most of their life, and imagine how THAT feels. God is supposed to protect you and yours, supposed to bless those who bless him and curse those who curse him, so what is THIS fresh horror??

It's all a matter of perspective.

Once I exited the faith for the proximal reasons discussed above, I had the opportunity to consider my relationship to reality, and I have come to the conclusion that dealing in reality, even when it's bare-metal (sometimes, bare-knuckle) reality and not pleasant, is better in the long run than leaning on religious faith, which never seems to deliver for me. Your mileage can, and will, vary.

I wish you well on your journey. Ultimately you should do what makes you happy, whether or not I or anyone else agrees with it. But make sure that happiness is sustainable and doesn't avoid the parts of reality you don't like. Make sure you aren't disappointed when life throws you a curve ball and your belief system can only deflect and evade the issue rather than actually help or comfort you.

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