december_solstice (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
december_solstice) wrote2015-09-29 01:31 am
december_solstice) wrote2015-09-29 01:31 am
I'm an atheist that prays in desperate situations.
You're probably thinking -- She's been born again! God has spoken to the poor girl!.
Er...not exactly, fam.
Actually, the exact opposite has happened.
I think embracing (more like humoring) the idea of faith pushed me further towards the reality that our lives are very much our own and there is no outside force leading the world in which we live in. That our reality has ultimately been created by us. Our reality is of our making.
I realized humans reach out for faith, for comfort, in a time of great need. In a moment of desperation, when we feel powerless, when we believe ourselves to be weak, we want it so desperately for God, religion, and such to be true -- that a higher power will save us. Will love us. Will make us IMPORTANT. Will make us MATTER.
Similarly how we want so desperately there to be life after death, to be forgiven for our sins, that there is more to our existence than this -- that we are NOT insignificant in this great wide indifferent universe. A universe that has thrived without us for billions of years before we entered the picture, and ultimately, will thrive without us, for billions of years after we are out of the picture.
This is a hard to swallow. No human heart wants to feel this way -- wants to accept that life goes on once we're dead. That the plants, trees, planets, and so on are unaffected by our existence.
And, I get that. I can understand why faith exist. Why gods have been a part of our lives for hundreds of thousands of years. Why we worshiped the sun. Why we worshiped the stars. Why we worships gods. Because life is hard. Because we're HUMAN. We feel things. Because feeling obsolete is difficult. Because hope feels good. Because God is a beautiful delusion.
Er...not exactly, fam.
Actually, the exact opposite has happened.
I think embracing (more like humoring) the idea of faith pushed me further towards the reality that our lives are very much our own and there is no outside force leading the world in which we live in. That our reality has ultimately been created by us. Our reality is of our making.
I realized humans reach out for faith, for comfort, in a time of great need. In a moment of desperation, when we feel powerless, when we believe ourselves to be weak, we want it so desperately for God, religion, and such to be true -- that a higher power will save us. Will love us. Will make us IMPORTANT. Will make us MATTER.
Similarly how we want so desperately there to be life after death, to be forgiven for our sins, that there is more to our existence than this -- that we are NOT insignificant in this great wide indifferent universe. A universe that has thrived without us for billions of years before we entered the picture, and ultimately, will thrive without us, for billions of years after we are out of the picture.
This is a hard to swallow. No human heart wants to feel this way -- wants to accept that life goes on once we're dead. That the plants, trees, planets, and so on are unaffected by our existence.
And, I get that. I can understand why faith exist. Why gods have been a part of our lives for hundreds of thousands of years. Why we worshiped the sun. Why we worshiped the stars. Why we worships gods. Because life is hard. Because we're HUMAN. We feel things. Because feeling obsolete is difficult. Because hope feels good. Because God is a beautiful delusion.
It takes courage to believe ..
A great many years ago a discussion was held concerning the possibility of man being a product of the animal kingdom, that somewhere in the remote past what was been called the missing link picture:
by the artist Gabriel Max.
That there was a missing link between man and the animal, that this link was a bridge, and that across this bridge animals moved to become human, and that humanity is more or less an advanced animal creation, and that it has therefore the visible components of animal existence but something is different.
It has been impossible to prove conclusively to anybody's satisfaction, that the inner life of the human being is identical with that of the animal. If we wish to assume another hypothesis that is true, the unfoldment of form in nature through the various kingdoms as we recognize them. Apparently the purpose of this unfoldment as we find them is the creation of bodies, and that these bodies become the vehicles of energies and forces superior to themselves. It is become practically untenable in the knowledge we possess today to assume that the body and the person in the body, that these two constitute one identical being.
The body and the person are separate, the person may function through the body, and my gradually mold the body into the likenesses of its own purposes, but the person and the body are separate beings. Science is reluctant to accept this because to do so would permit the mind to conjure with the thought that if the person is separate from the body, that person can have existence apart from the body, and this is more or less a heretical position in terms of science. It is the opinion of science that the rise and fall of the human being is a complete pattern in itself, and that the individual had no existence before his birth, and will have none after death. This however again is a hypothetical approach to a problem, no one has ever been able to actually prove that the human being had existence before birth and is unable to prove with any conclusiveness that there is any existence after death. But scientifically speaking however, psychology is producing a wedge by means of which it is making it obvious that it is conceivable that the person and the body have separate existences, and that what we would call embodiment is the entry of a preexisting pattern into a material existence. If this is the case, and there seems to be an increasing support of this belief, then it would follow that various levels life would be embodied in various levels of bodies. This again presents the scientist with a problem because he would then have to concatenate life itself, we would have to assume that bodies are the symbols of the degrees of life that is within them, this would mean that the life in the mineral would be less evolved than the life in a plant, and that the life of the animal would be less evolved than the life of a human being thus we would have an evolution of a life through a series of forms and bodies suitable to the expression of that form of life, this constitutes a more or less philosophical approach and more or less agrees with the opinions of antiquity, transmigration or the entry of human souls into animal bodies was never generally recognized and where it was postulated it was nearly always in the form of punishment, that to be involved in less than a human body would be a punishment for the human being.