I hate being an atheist

[Irishman]

A lot of good things have been said, and most of the OP addressed.

Victory Candescence said:

I’m going to die, and then there will be nothing. What’s the point of doing anything if it’s all going to be erased?

Why must something be permanent for it to be meaningful? Meaning happens in the here and now. Meaning is what humans take from experience and life. You want to have a meaningful life? Do something to help someone else make their life better. Become an EMT. Volunteer to help with the homeless. Become a teacher. Build houses. Find what you want to do that helps others, and that is all the meaning you need. Accept life for what it is.

The problem isn’t with atheism or with the universe. The problem is with your expectations. Why should the universe care about you? Why should there be an underlying purpose to life? Why do you have to have a permanent effect on the world for life to be worth anything?

Jinx said:

I’ve listened to all the science talk from Big Bang to hydrocarbon molecules lingering by hot sea vents to the first single-celled organisms to fish leaving the water, wings from fins, Darwin’s missing link, and so on. (And, what have those sea vents done for you lately?) Anyway, to me it’s amazing how people so openly accept this. How can so many so-called accidents of nature and events of random chance evolve into all we have today? By that logic, if one believes only in science, then one must believe in the mathematical law of a Gaussian distribution, right? Obviously, these accidents should happen on a bell curve. And, we should be finding an equal number of genetic screw-ups and blobs of protoplasm as we do the diverse numbers of fully-functioning creatures. (If you argue survival of the fittest, then I argue where are the fossils of the screw-ups? Twisted piles of flesh and bones? Why haven’t we found one? Wouldn’t the bell curve apply here, too?)

What a complete and utter misunderstanding of what science says about how life developed.

Randomness is not the total process. It plays a role in mutation, but Natural Selection is not random. It’s not externally guided toward a goal, either. As already stated, a successful mutation will be passed on, so for us to find a fossil, we could find any of a the millions of instances of that mutation occurring. A bad mutation will terminate, so we would have to find that one instant.

Also, very few mutations will plop out a completely disrupted pile of flesh and bones. The genes control development, and the genetic code works like an assembly line. An error could occur here or there and still make its way into the completed product, but if there were the massive kind of errors to totally disrupt the whole end product, the assembly line would cease to operate. You won’t get an indescrimintate pile of car parts at the end, no matter how bad the plant is messed up. You either get something resembling a complete car with a few errors, or you have the process interrupted and all those parts disposed of.

matt_mcl said:

“You know, I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn’t it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe.” - Marcus Cole, Babylon Five

The problem with that quote is that most people don’t think they deserve the bad things that happen, so if we got what we deserved, it wouldn’t be nearly as bad. And I think it would be easier to take if we knew that all the bad things that did happen were because we deserved them. Certainly it would make considering the consequences of your actions more direct. The more frightening thought is this comment by Mr. Excellent.

Wouldn’t it be so much worse if it weren’t random? If someone “up there” thought you truly deserved all the bad things that happen to you? … Far better to view these things as the results of human agency, or simple chance, than to think there’s some fiend in Heaven responsible for dishing them out.

I guess that may be the intention behind your quote. What if we really do deserve the bad stuff that happens to us?

[Dung_Beetle]

I had a religious upbringing, and am now an atheist.

Trying to believe in religion, and the implications of it if it were true, made me miserable. As I left it further behind, I felt greater and greater relief, and when I was finally able to say to myself, “There is no god”, I felt a great weight slide off of me.

Reading this thread is really brightening my day.

[shiftless]

Yep, being an atheist can suck. I get a sort of existential angst sometimes that is hard to deal with. Kind of a mild panic attack when I think about eternity and my place NOT in it. Of course, I don’t have any choice so it doesn’t really matter if the road is hard, that is the only road that there is unless I want to play pretend. That wouldn’t really help me.

The nice part is the complete lack of any sort of moral code. Since there is no super-powerful god watching my every move I am free to murder and rape at will for the short time I have on this planet. Oops, gotta go - My office mate just left his desk and I think I’ll steal all his stuff while he is gone.

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

Interesting. I was a mild believer until I was… maybe 10 or so. Then I realized that I was a deist, since I couldn’t totally discount the whole divine spark theory.

Of course, being a deist is no more fun than being an atheist, since either way you believe there’s no uber-being looking after you.

[Victory_Candescence]

Thanks, everyone, I do feel somewhat better now. Perhaps my feelings are more mixed than most of you since my religious upbringing was relatively positive (they didn’t really discuss hell, only heaven, and God was presented more as a protector than a judge.)

The most novel point I’ve seen here is that some of you have called me “selfish”. That is actually very interesting and it hadn’t occurred to me before.

Hentor: It actually did occur to me that people might say that I must be a Christian or something planted here, but I assure you that I’m an atheist (willingly or not ).

Anyway, I’m only 26 so there’s still time to dedicate my life to something I really care about and accomplish what I need to.

–Jack

[fachverwirrt]

@Captain_Carrot

No, it doesn’t. The full rule is “I before E except after C, or when sounded like A as in neighbor and weigh.” Deity has an A sound, so the E comes first.

Actually the full rule is “I before E except after C, or when sounded like A as in neighbor and weigh, plus all those other exceptions, like weird, and caffeine, and forfeit, and atheist, and seize, and height, and leisure, and foreign, and heist, and heifer, and seismic, not to mention the reverse exceptions like science and prescience and ancient and… screw it, let’s have a drink.”

[Linty_Fresh]

@shiftless

The nice part is the complete lack of any sort of moral code. Since there is no super-powerful god watching my every move I am free to murder and rape at will for the short time I have on this planet. Oops, gotta go - My office mate just left his desk and I think I’ll steal all his stuff while he is gone.

Dad, how many times do I have to say it? DON’T DRINK AND POST!!

[Malacandra]

@Bryan_Ekers

Ah, but I know I’m using “noble” metaphorically. I don’t need the crutch of believing it in any literal way. At the very least, the evolutionary process as it relates to to development of knowledge (i.e. useful ideas aid in survival and increase, while useless ideas gradually fall away) is more appealing to me than any metaphorical fruit of the tree of knowledge and divine punishments for daring to step into the realm of things “man was not meant to know.” Fuck that noise twice, with a jackhammer.

Literal, metaphorical - the very idea that you feel the urge to apply the label in any case suggests a self-deluding tendency to ascribe meaning to the random wigglings of your molecules and bioelectric noise in your brain. Carry right on, O insignificant organic stain on a dirty rock whirling round a mediocre star in the ass-end of cosmic nowhere.

[Cagey_Drifter]

@Czarcasm

You no longer have blind faith-but this doesn’t mean you no longer have any faith.
Have faith in who is there for you. Your friends, your family, and the complete stranger who will stop by to help if you you look like you need it.
Have faith in yourself, that you might turn out to be the complete stranger that helps out someone else.
Have faith that you will live on in the memories of others and that, for good or ill, you will influence the future.
Have faith that others are trying to make this a better world.
Have faith in reality, marvel at what Mankind has accomplished in our short time on this planet, and try to imagine what we are yet capable of doing if we just have faith in each other.

:slow clap

(incidentally, this is the only time I have ever slow clapped and was not being sarcastic.)

[lisacurl]

You know what works real well for existential malaise? Doing something to help other people. It’s really hard to feel sorry for yourself because you don’t feel the loving presence of a daddy god metaphorically patting you on the boom-boom when you’re working yourself into exhaustion trying to clean an animal shelter, or trying to scrounge donations to keep a homeless feeding station up and working for another week. Interact with some folks who have nothing and you’ll know what the point of doing things are.

If this is all there is, if nothing we do matters… then all that matters is what we do. Now. Today.
If there is no greater meaning to all this, then the smallest act of kindness is the greatest thing in the world.
(paraphrased from the tv series “Angel,” which had a great underlying existentialist theme)

[Kimstu]

@Victory Candescence

Anyway, I’m only 26 so there’s still time to dedicate my life to something I really care about and accomplish what I need to.

Absolutely. You go, Jack.

[meenie7]

I just wanted to come in to tell the OP I feel their pain, especially on the “no comfort when people die” thing. If it really gives people comfort and happiness that once in a while, one little thing that the dead person did is remembered by someone else (like SkeptiJess’s story) then they really have a lower threshold of what’s needed to comfort them than I do. It’s not that I have some burning need to live on forever – it’s that I can’t bear the thought of losing the people who are important to me. It destroys a lot of the happiness that other people seem to feel about their day to day interactions with people for me, because I know it’ll end. There’s no comfort to be had anywhere in a world where I can NEED someone, the way I need my parents and my sister and my best friend, and they could still die. And yet, what am I supposed to do, become a robot and not love anyone? It completely sucks and no atheistic theory can address it.

[Scissorjack]

Everybody should believe something. I believe I’ll have another drink.

[wonky]

@meenie7

I just wanted to come in to tell the OP I feel their pain, especially on the “no comfort when people die” thing. If it really gives people comfort and happiness that once in a while, one little thing that the dead person did is remembered by someone else (like SkeptiJess’s story) then they really have a lower threshold of what’s needed to comfort them than I do.

Little things give me comfort because that’s all there is.

Most people who suffer a major loss, whether believer or atheist, find that grief is all about snatching what tiny shreds of comfort you can find. I think that many people who haven’t suffered a major loss don’t understand how little comfort there is in the world.

[Cazzle]

@Dangerosa

Most people, yes. But a few people get to live on in the memories of others through their work - through the history or the art that they helped create. Alexander the Great, Cleopatria, Tennyson - died so long ago that no one now has a living memory of them - yet they won’t be forgotten.

Even ‘small’ people who lived rather ordinary lives sometimes live on. People who wrote diaries during the Civil War, letters during WWII - there memories are meaningful to people who are interested.

I’ve recently been giving a lot of thought to the ongoing impact we have on people. I work with two members of one family - a mother and daughter. Recently, the other daughter of the family died, aged about 24. She had Down Syndrome, and died from related complications.

Anyway, in thinking about the greater picture, I realised how much of an impact she had on their lives. They are not the people they would have been had she never been born, and they will continue to influence other people’s lives in a way that they may not have had they never known her. The people we love aren’t just a part of our lives, they help make us who we are and their influence goes on long after they are no longer around. For the first time I realised how much our actions can change people and ripple on through the generations, be it for good or for bad.

[SkeptiJess]

@jsgoddess

Little things give me comfort because that’s all there is.

Exactly. We’re all going to die --that’s just a fact. And the people who love us will miss us when we do. That’s another fact. Missing people when they’re gone is the price we pay for loving them.

Remembering my lost loved ones is a comfort & a joy because it’s all the comfort & joy there is.

[Superfluous_Parentheses]

@MsWhatsit

You know, earlier in this thread I said that I don’t even have enough faith to be an atheist, which is something I’ve been saying for years now. But lately I’ve been having my doubts, and reading this thread has crystallized some things for me, and… I think I am an atheist. Really.

So, thanks, guys. I think.

You’re welcome. And welcome to the club I’ve spent a few years regarding myself as an agnostic, and a year or 3 ago I came to the conclusion I’m really just an atheist. I really couldn’t convince myself any god hypothesis I knew was worth considering.

Cheers,
CP.

[Jelymag]

@Victory_Candescence

…I assure you that I’m an atheist (willingly or not ).

I don’t mean this as an offense in any way at all, but if you aren’t willing, then why do it? (I’d say the same thing to someone who said they were an unwilling believer in a god.)

It’s okay to not be sure what you believe. That’s why God created agnosticism:D

[Superfluous_Parentheses]

@Kimstu

Absolutely. You go, Jack.

^ this.

I would like as many people as possible to turn atheist, since I think religion clouds the mind, but realistically and practically, I would prefer people to just use their minds to set their priorities and morals. I think that would be enough of a change for the better, for now, for pretty much everybody.

[Nzinga_Seated]

@Der_Trihs

There is no God, and that’s a GOOD thing.

T-shirt, please.