Nope, no crisis of non-faith. The closest was as a kid in school, most of my friends tended to be Sunday morning believers. They’d go to church, attend functions, but the rest of the week religion and god were rarely mentioned or thought of.
In high school, most of the girls we ended up hanging out with and socializing with tended to be the more fundamentalist religious types. They’d host Bible studies, young Christian fellowship meetings and the like. I never felt comfortable at these events and part of me wished I could believe even though deep down I thought it was all a waste of time and total BS.
Going to college was the best thing to happen to me because I was able to completely, eventually, get rid of the yolk of religion and stopped feeling like an outsider because of my lack of belief.
One “God”, “Many Gods”,“Mystical force of the Universe”, “The many humours and manifestations of the id, the ego, and superego”, “Spirituality”, “the Universe”, “The collective unconscious”, “The specialized and spiritualized domains of the psyche and their manifestations as angels, demons, demi-gods, and saints”…whatever you want to call it. I believe, so much as you believe he is real… I just don’t adhere to such a limiting/stingy, repressive, and exclusive dogma as you.
There is no Christian God in my belief system other than as one of many mythologies, just like zeus, or Ra, so I am an atheist… I don’t believe in any God… just people with a specialized brain trying to make sense of the Universe/Reality.
I don’t know if I’ve posted in this thread and I don’t want to go through it again, but I’ve been having something like that lately, and a few days ago decided I really can’t call myself atheist at this time after being rather confident in my “non-belief” for at least ten years now. More really. I’m not interested in arguing or fighting it; I’m just feeling happy and peaceful and I just want to see where it takes me.
I’ve been working at this awesome church charity. Something about it has changed me.
I do have moments of reflexive Xtianity. I was raised an evangelical fundie. My reflexive, lizard-brain first thought in response to terror (including terror that I was going to die when I nearly did from an embolism) is the mantra I was indoctrinated with as a child, “Please Jesus get me through this.”
Doesn’t mean I belive in Mithras…oh, sorry, Jesus, it’s just the response to fear I was taught as a kid.
It’s just that those Christians with their persecution/crucifixion complexes taken to such an embedded and existential degree, even the martyrdom we see today in the Islamic brethren, is just so disrupting and militant and flavors every Chistian of faith I have seen today, that they believe in the paranoia of their own making.