I'm an atheist that prays in desperate situations.

[december_solstice]

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.

Comments

RE: just saying hi

[outerspace-bae.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I'm bookmarking this!!!

I think the evolution from earth-based religion, paganism, indigenous, to "modern" religion is quite interesting. If I were to EVER submit (lol), I would probably be more inclined to worship earth-based religion.

I even danced in a bit of Wicca in my pre-adolescent and adolescent days.

Wow, 90% It feels more like 60...but I guess I'm way off. Then again I realized that of all the people I know, only 1-2 1/2 are openly atheist.

[ringlat.livejournal.com]

i too assumed it was more like 50%. thinking about it though, there's wayyy too many religious americans online and way too much religious stuff in even things like cartoons for it to be half and half. and there might be a lot of people who keep their religion more hidden...

since a while back i've been thinking about reincarnation, i watched a few videos and read a few stories where little kids had strong memories of past lives and they tried to do research to see if their past families etc. really did exist. there was also stuff like, a woman suddenly woke up speaking some archaic dialect that she shouldn't have heard/had contact with in real life, and then people whose lives flashed before their eyes - "all" of their lives, like all memories. and then people who suddenly strongly remember stuff from 60 years ago. even if most of that stuff is just lies, we still don't know how memories and the entire brain really work for example.

drugs can make you hallucinate - not only in sight and sound but in touch. you can even hallucinate other people existing (as my great-grandpa did in the hospital one time). what if the entire world is our hallucination? and when you sleep - what are dreams? what if (like that fiction book i plan on writing) dreams are, say, parallel worlds, or fragments of the "real world"?

my wife told me one time, that we humans know so little about the world, we can't possibly make any guess as to life and death. we probably know less than 1% about the world and the universe even with all we know now. we laugh at how, say, so many years ago they didn't know about germs, but in 20 or 50 or 500 years we're going to find this modern time just as primitive.

but, life DOES reuse everything in a way. when it rains, it goes into the ground and then eventually turns into clouds again. if a body rots, it gets reused into the soil. baby animals are born from other baby animals, reusing their genes and whatnot. all sorts of animals have consciousness and can learn stuff and (i'm sure) think thoughts. what happens to that kind of stuff in the "reuse" cycle is ours to guess...

but then again, i guess i did read a lot of stuff like the Golden Compass as a kid, where when you die you turn into golden powder that powers everything in the world lol. anyway if things like ghosts and reincarnation and gods exist, i doubt they're in any way that we've already guessed.

[outerspace-bae.livejournal.com]

'if things like ghosts and reincarnation and gods exist, i doubt they're in any way that we've already guessed." EXACTLY

We know so little about the universe. So so little. So little about the earth. Supposedly of the "known" universe, we can only observe like...1%? So, really, we know nothing.

I saw this circulating meme (lol) that said there is a theory that once someone discovers the true purpose of the universe EVERYTHING disappears. And that this has actually already happened before. HASHTAG Conspiracy Theory HASHTAG Illuminati confirmed

Lawlz.

I am honestly pretty open to a lot of these concepts and even did a healthy bit of research a few years back. I even had a lot of old age occult texts on my hard drive LOL Did I tell you that I used to work in research? Actually, I think I did. I still have access to otherwise inaccessible research databases through different research facilities and libraries. Though I of course used it for work, I also research a bunch of historical occult and other things of that nature out of personal interest.

You are correct when you say that everything in the universe is recycled. Everything from humans becoming fertilizer for thousand year old new forests to atoms, for example, that don't die.

I am open to the idea that consciousness is shared among all living things. I don't mean in a way that atoms have feelings, but that in some type of way, they know they exist. In no way do I have some kind of memory of a past life...of being a leaf or some shit. But wouldn't that be some shit?!?! We couldn't even guess the consciousness of a leaf or what the life of a leaf is like...or what it is like to be a plant. I mean really. Hashtag Talking out of my ass

[ringlat.livejournal.com]

HMMMMM if you have access, maybe you can find black magic spells for me then lol

black magic is insanely funny, the spells (at least the old ones in swedish) are like "find a human bone, fill it with pus, tie it to a string and dangle it into a river that flows in the direction of the person you want to make ill. they will stay ill until you take away the bone again."

"if you want to win in a lottery, go to a church, carve the number that you want to win onto the church door, then find a very old gravestone that's the relative of a person you know, tell him this..."

yeah, we only use what, 5% of our brain or something? wtf is the other 95% for?? WHAT IF IT CONTAINS ALL OUR DORMANT MEMORIES? lol

[outerspace-bae.livejournal.com]

I can look and let you know! Also that sounds hilarious LOL