The need to believe?

[Brian37]

Bingo!

"Me ... comforting me. And calling it god."

Similarly, I've often said that the only morality that exists is societal morality -- the net corpus of explicit and implicit negotiations between people about how to coexist and collaborate. But religion claims to have invented it, and to sustain it -- and even there, they use god as a proxy. God invented it, god sustains it. Yet the only morality a Christian has is the same morality a non-Christian has. They just ascribe a different origin story to it, and add extra features and prohibitions and such, so that "outsiders" can be accused of being licentious for not being as strict in some areas as the religion is.

Same thing here ... the only comfort is what you make for yourself or receive from other humans ... you have just been assigning that to god and assuming you can't obtain it anywhere else. It's just operant conditioning.

Another parallel is Christians thanking god for, say, eradicating cancer in someone -- when all along it was the doctors, the medicine, and their immune system that did the job.

Have a GREAT day ... bask in the revelation!

I wish most people would choose to communicate like you - some have in the thread (thank you), but there's always those who think they're smarter/better/stronger/more mature because they never got hung up on spirituality. From the sounds of it, I'm not alone, even among atheists, who have conflicts from time to time. Maybe not the identical conflicts, but conflicts nonetheless. Thanks for your respect to the topic...and to me.  And I am basking , it's good to finally make sense of all of this, and to deal with it. I've done a lot of rug sweeping and that really didn't get me anywhere.

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No one is better than anyone in our entire species history. In 5 billion years humans will be long extinct and there wont be anyone around then to give one fuck about you OR ME. 

I do however thing when making claims about the nature of reality, facts matter. No, I am not talking about government protection of human rights, I MOST CERTAINLY SUPPORT THAT.

But, the ability to utter a claim doesn't make it true by proxy of the ability to put a naked assertion in print or make sound waves.

Otherwise I could claim "Angelina Jolie is giving me a blowjob as you read this.". But somehow I think you rightfully reject that.

If I walked up to you in person tomorrow and claimed to you face to face, "The New England Patriots beat the Chicago Cubs in the Stanley Cup".... Would your response be "Oh that's cute"? Or like me "No and bullshit because the Patriots play football, the Cubs play baseball and the NHL championship called the Stanley Cup is unrelated to both baseball and NFL".

Instead of looking at bluntness in terms of hate of you the individual, maybe consider you got it wrong and the aim is at hate of bad logic?

I don't disagree with you, but the process of unraveling a mindset isn't always easy for everyone. That's the whole point of the thread, to share that all along, I have had a need to believe, out of fear, out of many things, but a need to believe in something that logically, has no factual basis. And that other people can relate to some of this, is helpful. And I'm not debating anyone, I'm admitting that I've allowed my emotions to override my logic. Seems like maybe you want to debate theism, but that's not the point of the thread.

Many of us here used to believe, including me. You are having residual emotions based on prior sales pitches. What you are feeling is no different trying to let go of Santa. No different then when I was growing up as a pre teen and teen pining after girls. it is natural to buy the script before you have the ability to question the script, but the reality is humans begin life mostly adapting the superstitions of their parents. No different than me facing the fact as a pre teen and teen having to face that the cheerleader will not automatically like you because you find her attractive.

If you admit you have allowed your emotions to rule you you are 99% there. The last step is to accept that it is STILL ok to have emotions, just don't chalk them up to Superman vs Lex Luther. Just like I at one time would have equated mere smile to a desire on her part to like me in return.

It is certainly ok to have emotions, as long as you don't let your brains fall out.