Hello, New atheist having a meltdown

[robvalue]

I can totally understand that. Ideas about afterlives have been shown to stifle the grieving process. It's not your fault, of course. Because we think people haven't really died, we don't go through the stages we need to in order to properly move on. It seems to me that you're now finally doing that grieving, but it's extremely harsh that you're forced to do it all at once for all the people you've lost. I wish I could offer more advice for how to actually get through it, but all I can say is that the grieving process is there for a reason, and you will eventually feel better when you are the other side of it.

[The Grand Nudger]

Welcome aboard.  

IDK if it will help, but look at it in a different light.  You never had any of those things before - and you've made it half a century.  It was always you comforting, guiding, protecting, intervening.  With friends, family, and pets, too.  

Sounds like heaven to me.

But how do you deal with the loss of those beings? 

The same way anyone else does, ultimately.  Regardless of whether a person believes or doesn't, we walk a significant portion of that path in grief and loss alone.  God is one many coping mechanisms, for some, though that belief doesn't uniformly comfort the faithful by any stretch.   I, personally, can find no comfort in the notion - but there are plenty more on display, and the faithful avail themselves of those as well.  

If I had to wager a guess, family ethos can put a person in a poor or strong spot when the inevitable occurs.  I first became aware of it when my great grandmother died.  Everyone packed into a jeep grand cherokee the color of juicy fruit and we drove 1k miles.  She was still alive when we got there.  The place was thick with everyone's rugrats.  She'd been battling cancer for awhile.  She still drug her hard old ass out of bed to make fishsticks for a few dozen of her sprawling brood, lol.  She passed away later that afternoon, from all the stories..she was never the kind of person to make a fuss or ruin a good party, she went out quietly, peacefully, we didn't even know she was gone till dinner.  Not a complete surprise.  I like to think she went out with a smile, the sound of four generations drifting through the air.  We set off enough fireworks that night to raise the dead.  My grandfather deals with grief by blowing shit up.  

I was very young, the finality of the thing was a concept to me, then.  I'd only met her the one time, I only have that single memory.  My mother cried the whole 14 hour trip.  My grandmother was a statue at the wheel.  My grandfather spent the whole ride back telling us every story he could remember..some true, some conflations, some obvious fiction.  He has this peculiar way of smiling whenever he tears up, and a deep sorrowful laugh he interjects every third or fourth sentence.  The best story he told perfectly encapsulating the differences between the two most important women in his life.  It was a conversation they'd had after she flatlined some years beforehand.  Birdie met Jesus!  She'd been to heaven, she'd heard the choir.  She described it all to Peggy, my grandmother, in vivid detail.  She was exuberant..happy.  At the end of all of this, Peggy turns to her and says "Birdie, that would bore me to tears."  

In the middle of all of this, I remember feeling awful.  Not for her loss, she was a character, now, in his meandering stories.  For my mother.  For the inconsolable nature of the situation.  Still a child, and needy and selfish like every child, stuck in a car for the better part of a day..I wanted her attention and she was despondent.  I cried because she was crying.  I hugged her, and I ran my fingers through her hair..I did all of the things my mother did when -I- was sad.  None of that could change the fact that her granny was gone.  I'm tearing up...and laughing nervously, like a certain storyteller, as I recount this.  It's right up at the top of my most painful memories..but it's not even my pain that I'm remembering.  It sounds trite as an adult, but then, what I knew about death was just the one certain thing.  It was the saddest thing in the whole world.  I still think so. 

It was my grandmothers turn over the barrel next.  She'd taken responsibility for her own father, for the last few years of his life.  Years he spent walking all of -his- great grandchildren through the palmetto scrub, or taking us fishing, teaching me to play a dulcimer he'd made for me.  Hunting hogs and letting me pretend I'd took em down with my daisy bb gun.  Pulling the kind of pranks on people only an old man can get away with, looking back at me..winking, me looking up at him in complete admiration.  Telling us even more stories about our parents and grandparents (the embarrassing ones parents never tell children of their own volition).  Telling me stories about WW2.  He'd be the last person in my family to tell true war stories with any regularity, though we've all served.  By the end, he'd long outlived his frame.  He wasn't rushing headlong into the abyss..but he knew that when he blinked out, he wanted to stay dead.  My grandmother couldn't respect those wishes the first or the second time.  She wasn't ready to let go of her father.  He spent a few unnecessary years in pain and the isolation of going mostly deaf, and mostly blind.  The endless privation of time, one indignity piled atop another.   He made it very clear, after the second time..that if she wouldn't let him go he'd wander out into the swamp and find his own goddamned exit.  He never saw anything that he told us about.  It was just lost time, to him..something he'd become very familiar with.  I asked him what it was like once, and he says "Alot like being alive, but without arthritis."  -Pro.

Third time was the charm.  She sucked it up and let her dad go with whatever shred of pride he had left.  Some people regret the time they didn't spend with their loved ones.  She'd come to regret the time she had.  Not because she didn't love him dearly or he was anything other than a solid human being, but because she'd stolen that time..and in the process, stolen something from him.  He'd become a burden to his own daughter.  For a few weeks afterward I'd hop out of bed and run into his room fully expecting him to be in there, getting on his flannel jacket in the middle of a floridian summer to take me out.  It didn't click, it couldn't click...and I'd cry.  It was different this time.  It wasn't -just- other people's pain, seen as an observer.  It was different for another reason as well.  Here was a man who's body had become so weak that part of the reason he always took us with him on his walkabouts..was so that we could help him through the sugarsand.  Inside, though, the man was made of iron.  Crying was the order of the day when Birdie died..but here it was inappropriate.  It didn't respect his memory, it was discordant with who he was, what he wanted.  It fundamentally changed my grandmother.  My mother couldn't bring herself to the wake.

The next few years all of my great aunts and uncles began to pass away.  All of my grandfather and grandmothers siblings.  One after another..and we're a big family.  The writing was on the wall.  We started to expect the inevitable phone call...but that's not what happened.

It was a call from the other side of my family.  My father had died, in a tub full of lukewarm water, at his parents house....complications of medication and the flu.  I hadn't spoken to him or seen him in more than a decade.  Calling me was an afterthought, I was his eldest, but only through adoption...and it had been a messy divorce.  I was quite, calm...very well composed until I hung up.  I ran into my bedroom, buried my face in a pillow, and choked out yet more tears.  I don't think I've ever made a more miserable sound.  My wife asked me what was wrong, I screamed in her face without even trying to, "My dad, my dad, my dad."  It was really just then that I realized I'd been meaning to talk to him someday.  That I had questions.  I was too old to fall into the villainizing trap that a certain kind of divorce and custody arrangement produces, but it was inconvenient to stay in touch and I was young and had a life of my own to deal with.  A sad comment on the matter..was that I was the only one of my sibling old enough to have really remembered him at all.  He coached my softball team.  His real son, my little brother..asleep behind me right now, can only remember his father vaguely and through stories.  

His death redeemed him, however.  The hagiography began immediately.  My mother hadn't said a kind word about him in memory but she's had nothing but kind words since.  None of my friends even realized I'd ever had a father, lol.  If they were under the impression that I'd simply fallen out of the sky and into her lap, they would be well within reason, and she was the person who gave them that impression.  A modern day virgin birth, lol.  I showed up the next day at my Nana and Dot Dots (his parents).  I wasn't entirely welcome, and no one expected me.  His death, in and of itself, was a surprise.  He'd made no arrangement, left no provision, and no one in his family was in a position to recover his body and pay the fees for it's final disposition.  His father was completely broken.  I thought that -I'd- made a miserable sound..but it was nothing in comparison.   He wasnt breathing so much as groaning, an impossibly heavy stone on his chest.  He would be dead within months.  His wife right behind him.  The death of my father gave me a sense of urgency, clarity, I needed to take control of the situation. I needed to make sure that his estate was properly handled.  I needed to be certain that my mother was finally made whole if there was any way for me to do so.  I needed to know that his son got closure and a piece of his father in death, even if it never materialized in life.  I needed to make sure that his daughter got his ashes and had all the time she needed to part with her daddy.   She'd been the only one of us who kept up with him.  So that's what I did.  I stuffed all of that down and the  initial scream into the pillow and then at my wife was all that ever escaped from me on his count.  Business business business.  I was the grown up now.  The only man in the room.  I had to act like it...because if I didn't.....I would be back in that jeep, crying because other people are crying, not knowing what to do.

More than you asked for...but there it is.  A small description of how many people in my family have handled death over the past four decades..how I came to learn to handle it.  No two people in that story have or had the same beliefs about gods...or practically anything else.   The one thing we all agree on, though..is that we want our deaths, ideally, to be more of a party than a funeral.  More play, less work.  I want to drive this beater till the wheels come completely off.  I want to go out like Birdie, and face it like Warney.  I have to acknowledge it, to face it in life, or my children will be forced to face it when I'm gone as I did with my father.  In death I might even overcome some of my shortcomings in life..If I play my cards right.  I cant outlive my children, like Dot Dot and Nana did..because I won't survive that anymore than they managed to.  I'll probably live much longer than I expect (and far longer than I'll be comfortable with, by the end).  My own grandparents aren't aging so much as petrifying.  My grandfather is supposed to have been dead any year now from his own various ailments for as long as I've been alive.  The man is a walking cocktail of steroids and he's hard as a coffin nail already.  Guys in his 80's...but I wouldn't wanna get into a drunken brawl against him.  Too mean for heaven, to warm for hell..I suppose.  Ideally, most of my remaining loved ones will deal with -my- death..not the other way around.  My mother is young, she was a teen when she had me, there's significant overlap in our circle of friends, hell..shes always been my best friend.  Brute force of demographics suggests we're likely to live and die pretty much together, save a few years at the end.  I'll cross that bridge when I get there.

Still, the prospect of my grands death is terrifying.  Utterly, unabashedly, and completely terrifying.  The world will be an objectively shittier place without them in it, together. No amount of them being in some better place..if there is such a place, will change that fact.  I would sooner burn this world to cinder with everyone in it than be apart from them.  When their lights go out...I'd consider turning all of you motherfuckers out the party in pure, unfiltered rage..if only for a moment.  Can't be a party pooper, though, can I?  They will die.  They know it..I know it...it's not a remote prospect.  I'll have to dig real deep, and hopefully combine alot of what I'd learned up above.  Make sure they have their dignity, make sure that all parties are made whole.  Take the time to cry into a pillow.  Tell stories in between fits of nervous laughter and smile through tears.  Keep silent when others need the space to sound out their own grief.  Console those who once consoled me.  Reassure those who will watch me die one day. Have nothing but good things to say. Show up. Let them go. Be the good son.  The good father.  The good man.  A good life, a good end.

That's how I've done it, and how I hope to do it better each time....culminating in my own end.

[Fireball]

That's powerful stuff, Khem.

[The Grand Nudger]

I think it helps new non believers (and existing believers) to be reminded that in we're all equals in things like this.  That a person deal with loss and death the same way after they stop believing as they did before..and the same way even if they've never believed.  Poorly, brilliantly, not at all.  Fitful starting and stopping, some loss worse than others.  Some cathartic, even.

Or at least I hope it helps our new member, lol.

[Dragonfly]

Khemikal,

Thanks for sharing your story. It does help to read your story and realize that grieving is still gut-wrenching for people of all faiths.

In my parents' church, the verse, "But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope," is stressed a lot around the time of death. I remember a couple of children whose parent had died, and they didn't even cry for days, if not ever. Even my mom said that it wasn't normal or healthy not to cry or grieve. When my atheist boyfriend's stepfather recently was dying, my mom said that she hoped he had God because otherwise she didn't know how a person could get through a thing like death. At their church funerals, there's a lot of preaching about the hope they have after death. Their website emphasizes not grieving "as those who don't have hope" and that the grief process is much easier to get through than if you don't have God. It never felt normal to me to hear singing about that glorious day that someone "went home to be with the Lord."

[The Grand Nudger]

Or people of no faith.  

Are you feeling..right now, that the grieving process is much easier because of what you were taught about god, or are you feeling that you've been torpedoed when it comes to death? As you put it..your whole schema for life?  Seems to me like those myths leave adults wholly unprepared.  Now that you've come over to the dark side..so to speak, it might be helpful to remember that the duplicity of god belief isn't actually limited to statements about gods..but also about themselves and other people, and specifically about people who don't believe as they do.

First they scare you with bullshit stories....then they double dip by telling you that you'd just be lost without them. Life and death would be unrecognizable. In my experience, people who initially fall away from faith still believe those subtler but equally faithful claims. Are they really true though? Are you lost without god, or are we all lost without those we deeply love?

Personally...I -love- hymns...especially the morbid ones. I am a deeply southern person. The only place any of my loved ones could go to "be at home" is with me, and the only place I'd go to..if I were a ghost, is back home with my loved ones (I'll haunt this place like a motherfucker if it's an option - forever. They'll never get rid of me. I built it up!). That was their home, this is my home. Still, I appreciate the sort of longing and remorse and sorrow that leads to those sorts of expressions. I know it too. I feel it, so I can convincingly sing it, even if I don't believe the sorrounding mythology.

Whole lot of words..I guess..to say that it's okay that you can't cotton to the loss of your loved ones, or to be lost by them. Who can? Terrible bastards, that's who.

[Dragonfly]

Or people of no faith.  

Are you feeling..right now, that the grieving process is much easier because of what you were taught about god, or are you feeling that you've been torpedoed when it comes to death?  As you put it..your whole schema for life?  Seems to me like those myths leave adults wholly unprepared.  Now that you've come over to the dark side..so to speak, it might be helpful to remember that the duplicity of god belief isn't actually limited to statements about gods..but also about themselves and other people, and specifically about people who don't believe as they do.

First they scare you with bullshit stories....then they double dip by telling you that you'd just be lost without them.  Life and death would be unrecognizable.  In my experience, people who initially fall away from faith still believe those subtler but equally faithful claims. Are they really true though?  Are you lost without god, or are we all lost without those we deeply love?  

Personally...I -love- hymns...especially the morbid ones.  I am a deeply southern person.  The only place any of my loved ones could go to "be at home" is with me, and the only place I'd go to..if I were a ghost, is back home with my loved ones (I'll haunt this place like a motherfucker if it's an option - forever.  They'll never get rid of me.  I built it up!).  That was their home, this is my home.  Still, I appreciate the sort of longing and remorse and sorrow that leads to those sorts of expressions.  I know it too.  I feel it, so I can convincingly sing it, even if I don't believe the sorrounding mythology.

Whole lot of words..I guess..to say that it's okay that you can't cotton to the loss of your loved ones, or to be lost by them.  Who can?  Terrible bastards, that's who.  

I'm feeling like the delusion helped me cope with the permanent nature of death a lot. Now I'm terribly depressed about not seeing them again. When relatives I love died, I was crushed by the loss, but still it was very comforting to think that I would see them again. I hung onto that hope. I still grieved, but it was for my loss, not theirs, as I thought they were in a blissful place where they felt nothing but joy. I've seen people of faith go through the Kubler-Ross model of grieving, and rather than be stuck in denial, they have gone through the whole process, but aided by their delusion. That's not to say that some don't get stuck. 

Right now I'm torn because of what I feel that I've discovered about the world--that God doesn't exist--and the fact that I'm really not doing well with this realization. While it is/was a delusion, I functioned better in many ways with it. It didn't fully satisfy, no, because I often felt like I was praying to nothing. But there was always some measure of hope and comfort the delusion brought. 

I am someone who has always had issues with anxiety, depression, and obsession. I wonder if I am psychologically strong enough to handle the truth and live without a belief in God and Heaven. I find myself wanting to claw my way back to religion--a "safe" place where there were perhaps easy answers to my questions, but they were answers that offered some measure of comfort. Now the unanswered questions and belief in the finite nature of life feel oppressive almost beyond toleration. I constantly rock when I sit or lie in bed. I don't want to get out of bed. I have headaches and am constantly sick to my stomach and running to the bathroom. I keep having these desperate thoughts that maybe I can somehow believe in evolution, the Big Bang, and that these thousands of other myths existed, but that there's still some kind of God out there? Yet I've opened Pandora's box. If I could somehow regain some semblance of belief in God, it would be even less satisfying than it was as I would constantly be reminded of the arguments against God's existence. 

Despite my rationally not believing in God, I'm also having psychological abuse from my childhood surfacing. I think things like "now you've committed the unpardonable sin [by not believing], and at the Judgment when you die, Jesus will say 'I never knew you; depart from me,' and then I will be thrown in Hell. And another thought that "whoever denies me before men, I will also deny him before my Father in heaven." In short, all of my toxic, religious crap is surfacing even though my rational brain says it's not true. 

I guess I am having a breakdown. I have immense respect for all of you who are functioning so well in your unbelief. You're apparently much stronger than I am. I don't know how/if I will get through this.

[The Grand Nudger]

I'm feeling like the delusion helped me cope with the permanent nature of death a lot. Now I'm terribly depressed about not seeing them again. When relatives I love died, I was crushed by the loss, but still it was very comforting to think that I would see them again. I hung onto that hope. I still grieved, but it was for my loss, not theirs, as I thought they were in a blissful place where they felt nothing but joy. I've seen people of faith go through the Kubler-Ross model of grieving, and rather than be stuck in denial, they have gone through the whole process, but aided by their delusion. That's not to say that some don't get stuck. 

Well...sure, same for me.  The dead feel no pain.  The loss can only be mine.  It can only be those who one day survive me.  

Right now I'm torn because of what I feel that I've discovered about the world--that God doesn't exist--and the fact that I'm really not doing well with this realization. While it is/was a delusion, I functioned better in many ways with it. It didn't fully satisfy, no, because I often felt like I was praying to nothing. But there was always some measure of hope and comfort the delusion brought. 

If life, just life itself... were truly devoid of hope and comfort in the absence of gods.. then we wouldn't have survived long enough to make up the god of your childhood in the first place.  You don't have practice separating the divine from the mundane..when it comes to hope..yet.  That will change.  You're clearly a survivor, half a century speaks to the point.  

I am someone who has always had issues with anxiety, depression, and obsession. I wonder if I am psychologically strong enough to handle the truth and live without a belief in God and Heaven. I find myself wanting to claw my way back to religion--a "safe" place where there were perhaps easy answers to my questions, but they were answers that offered some measure of comfort. Now the unanswered questions and belief in the finite nature of life feel oppressive almost beyond toleration. I constantly rock when I sit or lie in bed. I don't want to get out of bed. I have headaches and am constantly sick to my stomach and running to the bathroom. I keep having these desperate thoughts that maybe I can somehow believe in evolution, the Big Bang, and that these thousands of other myths existed, but that there's still some kind of God out there? Yet I've opened Pandora's box. If I could somehow regain some semblance of belief in God, it would be even less satisfying than it was as I would constantly be reminded of the arguments against God's existence. 

You -can- believe in all of that concurrently.  You just don't..at least not at present.  I'm an antitheist, my wife is a full on christer.  We don't disagree on evolution, or cosmology.  She's an educated woman, lol.  One of the things she loves about me is how many myths I know..how I can tell them all to our kids.  How I can sell them, hard.

Despite my rationally not believing in God, I'm also having psychological abuse from my childhood surfacing. I think things like "now you've committed the unpardonable sin [by not believing], and at the Judgment when you die, Jesus will say 'I never knew you; depart from me,' and then I will be thrown in Hell. And another thought that "whoever denies me before men, I will also deny him before my Father in heaven." In short, all of my toxic, religious crap is surfacing even though my rational brain says it's not true. 

I guess I am having a breakdown. I have immense respect for all of you who are functioning so well in your unbelief. You're apparently much stronger than I am. I don't know how/if I will get through this.

Well..jesus will tell many christians™ that they never knew him, and he never knew them.  That's who he was talking to..explicitly, in that passage in magic book.  Not non believers.  If there really is a good god, and jesus is that god...abusers have to be the target of that ire, not the abused, not the confused..not those lied to so egregiously they fall out of a false and pretentious faith.

I want to stress again that I'm -not- stronger..that was the point of sharing all of that with you.  You and I are the same, in this.  I've had alot of different reactions, and seen alot of them.  I'm certainly not proud of all of them..and I haven't always dealt with it well.  Now..sure, environmental differences.  I was never a believer.  I'm desensitized to death to an extent by service (at the same time i have guilt related to death not accounted for by loss or natural circumstance).....but underneath it all is just another person like you.  I cry.

You're gonna be fine.  So what if your ex boyfriend talks shit to his dad about you..ultimately?  Is that the kind of good god stuff you're supposed to bow down to?  Is that the prince of mercy speaking, or just another jilted asshole putting words into his mouth about a girl who didn't want to go to the prom with him?





I don't know...day to day, whether I'll get through this, either.  Then I wake up and it's another day.  Life can be sad.  So sad...but that's not all that life is, or can be.  I'm sure I don't need to tell you that.  You know.

[Brian37]

You do not need a religion to live your life. Everyone has ups and downs in life to greater or lesser degrees. Labels, not even that of "atheist" will automatically determine if that individual will do good or bad in life. There is no magic to human's behaviors. Our species ability to be cruel or compassionate is not in a religion, not in a political party, not in an economic view. There were no nations, no political parties, no religions 200,000 years ago, and life, not just humans, but all life, was evolving without it.

Our species ability to be cruel or compassionate isn't in a label, but in our evolution. Certainly it is still up to us as a species how we interact with each other, but there is no magic to the good or bad we do. There is not one nation, friend or foe alike, that does not have hospitals or prisons.

Do not feel bad because you left a position. It is ok to look at a position and come to the conclusion that the position was not valid. If our species never question social norms our species never would have left the caves.

Humans do not need religion. Religion is nothing more than a rabbit's foot or a jock's superstition that lucky socks help them win the game.

It isn't to say that religious people are bad, no. But most humans get sold the religion of their parents long before they can formulate adult critical thinking skills.

If you left one religion for the Jewish religion, the people who sold it to you still are a result of their ancestors passing it down to them. No religion escapes this fact other than the spin offs created by older religions that become newer religions.

If it makes you feel any better, the name "Yahweh" was stolen by the Hebrews from the polytheistic Canaanites.

[Dragonfly]

Khemikal,

I've read your post over several times, and it makes sense. There are more coping mechanisms at play than just the God illusion. I think perhaps I've rushed into things so quickly that I haven't had time to adapt emotionally. I have OCD with a strongly obsessional quality rather than compulsive. That tends to lead to obsessing over even the great mysteries and needing to have answers to everything *right now* (!). It's not healthy. I think I need to pull back, read more posts, and ease into my unbelief rather than trying to give it a label right now. Someone elsewhere described that as going from one addiction to another. Not sure how accurate of a description that is, but this is a process, so why not take some time with it rather than expect change overnight? Tonight I'm going to have some herbal medicine and take it easy rather than obsessing about all of this. Thanks again for your posts. They've helped a lot.