I miss the idea that no matter how shitty my life was, things were going to get better for me if I just believed God’s plan. I miss the idea that my mom and grands were waiting for me up in Heaven. I miss thinking I was special to my daddy god because my real daddy was straight out of a nightmare.
Nope. Clear thinking is a virture. I suppose it may be something of a cheap comfort to some, particularly if they have had a rough life of some sorts. Still not sure how grown adults buy into it though.
Hey, cheap comfort is cheap comfort (even if it’s absurdly expensive cheap comfort). Plus a lot of grown adults buy into it because it being true has become part of their personal self-definition. Sunk cost fallacy writ large.
I was raised religious. I was a “believer” from birth. Not believing in god didn’t make any sense to me.
This changed over time, especially as I became more involved in the church, I thought that made my belief stronger.
The problem was when I started questioning, not at first questioning in a doubting way, but more of a clarification. That didn’t always go over all that well. When I started having doubts, things went downhill quickly.
None of it really made any sense, it was all self contradictory, and it really seemed as though people chose what to believe, and then shopped around to find a church that taught that. I was on the welcoming committee for a few years, and the usual thing was for them to ask what our positions on various topics were, and if they weren’t a good enough match, they’d move on. Occasionally, they would even ask, “Do you know of a church that believes ‘x’?”
It didn’t help that my beliefs were slipping away from 100% match with my church (the one I grew up in), as I started to see the bible stories as allegories and parables, not as literal historical facts. My “Jesus is our whipping boy” thesis just about got me kicked out, as it did not comport with official doctrine.
I did alot of praying, I kept my eyes open for some sort of sign, but nothing. I experienced no divine revelations or visions or even epiphanies in my search for a personal connection to God and Jesus. I lost my belief in the divinity of Jesus, and ultimately, my belief that such a man ever existed at all. I see it as mythology designed to demonstrate how to live a better life. I still called myself a christian, in that I try to follow in the footsteps of christ, even though I don’t believe he ever existed.
That’s been my status quo from my late teens.
Now, recently, a very good friend of mine died. He was a practicing, devout christian. Now, if I believed that believing in some divine stuff, showing up at church once in a while, and being a “good person” would mean that I get to see him again, that’s a deal I would be more than willing to make. I actually do want to believe.
Doesn’t help. I believed in Santa Claus as a child as well, and even the Easter Bunny. My belief in those fictitious entities did not make them manifest as real, they were just delusions that needed to be outgrown in order to become a functional adult. No matter how much I wish the Tooth Fairy is real, she does not pay for my dental work.
The pastor of his church ran the memorial service, and the plugs for Jesus were fairly obnoxious, to be honest. I had considered talking to him after the service, and maybe even showing up at his church for regular service, but after his constant harping on the Jesus, I was really turned off from it. I actually do want to talk to him, as he knew a side of my friend that I didn’t, and that is something that I would like, but I just can’t, not with the timeshare salesmen pushy attitude that he takes in selling his brand of divinity.
Dealing with the concept of no life after death can be devastating, and there is such thing as a spiritual void. Mankind has always had a unexplained need to acknowledge a higher power as a security blanket. All the religious laws and canons are means to define and refine that need, but it requires faith devoid of reason. That’s why I couldn’t cultivate a belief in any deity, much less the Christian god. If there are superior deities, we’re not capable of conceiving them, much less able to define their whims by obeying laws born of superstition. It’d be like ants trying to figure out humans. All they know is ant stuff. If they worship us, we don’t conceive their adulation. We stomp them and send clouds of death their way. Maybe they think they offended the ant god and build bigger colonies in homage, but if we’re interested, we put them between two panes of glass and occasionally focus magnifying glass beams on them. They have nothing to offer us.
What do we have to offer higher powers? If they wanted anything, they’d take it, and consider us inconsequential.
So we can either deny the existence of gods or decide we’re incapable of interacting with them. Either way, it’s not comforting to realize you’re entirely on your own.
I reconciled this by saying “The Universe is God.” The universe created me. I can look out and see the universe, and I don’t need to rely on faith or a labyrinthine system of beliefs to understand it. The universe is an everlasting mystery, and knowing there’s an infinite amount of facts yet to be discovered is what elevates me. I’m always interested when astronomers discover new planetary systems and find evidence that counters our theories of how our solar system was made. There’s even micro-universes at our fingertips we haven’t explored.
Do you still have the chicken pox? 
I’ve been asking myself this question a lot since the thread we had about it last month. The only rationale I come up with is that some people are mortified and unable to accept a universe in which there’s nothing there. I’m quite comfortable with there being nothing out there. But many of my family members and friends don’t want to live in that universe, so they happily fabricate some meaning. Or, more specifically, borry someone else’s fabrication.
There was a time, once, when I wished I did believe. I had just lost someone who was very important to me, and at that moment I wanted to believe that there was something after death so that I could see her again after in the next life more than anything in the world.
At an earlier time in my life, I sorta wished that I had some sort of belief. I know that once or twice I said to myself, ‘Lord, if you get me out of this one, I’ll get out of the next one all by myself.’ But nowadays I have no truck with organized religion: too many fucking rules. Same for atheism, for that matter. All I seem to see from religious groups is how much they hate you if you’re not one of them. The can all fuck right off.
I’ve been a philosophical atheist since around 13 (I have a better understanding now of why I am an atheist but the groundwork was laid at that age). I try not to be militant or disagreeable, but I am not interested in religion for myself.
But I believe I understand what the OP is saying. I see 2 benefits. For one, I believe that the type of praying that he says his mother does is akin to meditation, something that is almost certainly beneficial and doesn’t require faith to work. It is just a set of long-studied techniques for calming and focusing the mind. I don’t practice it myself (yet) but the principles make sense to me.
The other benefit is social. There are few venues any more in this country where people come together and spend the kind of social time and energy as some people do in church. For many, worship is second to fellowship. And that is something that I actually do wish for, even if I can’t abide the setting, even a UU “church.” I can be a cranky old fart and I like the idea of belonging to a group of people who would give me the benefit of the doubt and like me anyway. (Possible fantasy description of a church congregation.) Also as a bulwark against growing old alone and against the storms of chaos that life is apt to throw in one’s way.
So while I do not crave religion at all, I can see some rational benefits to some of the trappings of religion.
No. The very question is offensive.
No. In fact I’m very happy I don’t.
Nope, but it doesn’t matter - I was a canny kid and realized that my body would heal on its own eventually - the only reason I’d need some god’s aid would be to cure it immediately. Such godly aid failed to materialize.
It’s probably worth noting that it’s a different situation between people who are already established theists and people who are looking on it as newcomers or outsiders. Established theists have built large chunks of their life on the foundation of their beliefs and of their religious institutions, and everything from their social lives to their support systems to their moral codes are tangled up with their church and beliefs. To them abandoning their religion would mean being cast adrift with no support and no idea of what to do or how to behave.
I mention the morality angle because I was raised in a religious family, and was taught no morality whatsoever besides “act like this because God says so”. That didn’t click with me, so for quite a long time I was an amoral little shit, until I finally bootstrapped my way up through the various secular moral philosophies one after the other. So I can easily see how to many theists atheism seems like a moral and ethical void - they have not been taught anything that will allow them to function without a keeper.
Seconded with gusto. I went to a local UU church and was creeped right the hell out, but if I could find a social community that accepted me on my own merits without the creepy theistic crap I’d be on it like white on rice. Despite being antisocial and hating crowds.
Yeah, the older I get, the more silly that whole “worship-needing deity” concept seems to me.
I have had that wish.
I don’t think I have ever wished that I believed in Christianity. An all-knowing, ominiscient narcissistic Judgy McJudgyson doesn’t appeal to me one little bit. Nor does an eternity in hell for minor crimes and offenses.
But there have been times when I wished I believed in a loving personal god, just to feel connected to religious family members and other loved ones.
I remember when I was in high school geometry. I was having a hard time with the material, and my teacher wasn’t really helping me get it. One day the department chair caught me freaking out over an upcoming exam and spent an hour tutoring me. Then we rode the train home together, and she spent another 30 minutes telling me how Jesus was going to help me pass the test. Now at that time I considred myself a Christian. But I didn’t really think Jesus meddled in trivial affairs like high school geometry tests. Still, I wanted to believe because this incredibe woman who I admired a lot believed it so whole-heartedly.
To quote an old friend of mine: “Thank God I’m an atheist.”
Of course being atheists doesn’t prevent me and my husband from celebrating holidays (e.g. Christmas has become secular anyway). This time of year, we have a “holiday tree” up, plus a couple of menorahs.
most of the time, I have a sort of inner peace, despite being a non-believer. I don’t really know why. Just lucky, I guess.
I am a member of a reform Jewish congregation and several secular organizations, and I get emotional support, social networks, and organizational support for good works from many of those.
But I confess, when the 30 year old daughter of friends died, I was a little jealous of their belief that she was in heaven, and not just gone.
I love some of the Christmas hymns, too, but don’t feel drawn to the message.
I used to think that it would be comforting (existentially anxiously speaking) but it doesn’t seem to me that the religious folks I know feel much comfort.
Pretty much the only time is at family funerals. At those times I would like to believe that the departed is not gone forever, that I will see him/her again in some happy afterlife. Possibly it would help with the grieving process.
However, I can’t. I do distract myself by resisting the urge to start ranting every time someone says “He’s in a better place” or something long those lines.
And when I go, I don’t want to see it coming. “90 years old, shot in the back walking out of a bar by a jealous husband.”
A quarter century ago, when I was 18, I went through a tough breakup. I was, let’s just say not the most emotionally healthy independent 18-year-old in existence, and the day of the breakup I was devastated.
Now, I’d spent years seeing, talking with, and mocking the obnoxious street preachers in our town, and I knew that a lot of them had turned to Christ after a low point in their own lives. That morning, rich with anguish and despair, I decided that I could try what they’d tried: I’d grown up in a church, was a confirmed Presbyterian, could possibly return to the church. I prayed for the first time in years.
By the afternoon, I’d had enough of that bullshit pretending. It wasn’t working. I felt like an idiot, which wasn’t exactly helping with my despair. I may as well have been praying to Banjo the Clown Puppet for all the comfort it was giving me.
And that was the last time I’ve wished for religion. Ever since then, when it might otherwise appeal, I remember the shitty falseness of that experience, and don’t bother with the motions.