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

[(Anonymous)]

nobody cares

[(Anonymous)]

Wow! That's an amazing article!

[wosny.livejournal.com]

I have been thinking a lot about religion and God, and such.
I wonder how people choose their God and their religion, should one choose the oldest or the newest? Should one be prepared to die for one's beliefs, or to kill for them?
If there were no religion, in the fashion of John Lennon's Imagine, would there be other ways of making differences, in order to bring about groups that fight each other?
Yes, brains need a spirituality...but...

[drkellogg.livejournal.com]

I've come to a similar conclusion. What is a prayer, anyway? A wish...a hope...a thought for something better. In this context, I have no issue whatsoever about praying for someone. I just use a different definition than many!

[ringlat.livejournal.com]

someone had on their profile some quote about how "i used to feel sad about how everything was unfair in the world, then i realized that if life WERE fair it'd mean that we all deserved what we got, and that was scarier" lol

[tehubernerd.livejournal.com]

This is a truly intriguing entry, no matter what religious belief/view one follows. I enjoyed your thoughts. It makes one think. Especially since I've come to terms that in Christianity people want God to love them as a Fatherly figure (from what I understand in my learning so far). I think we can agree on that. Well-written and well-thought!

I was like you

[italianespresso.livejournal.com]

Well, girl, I was like you, gotta admit that. Then I undestood that the belief in something higher is some serious shit, that i really cannot agree with, but that has my full respect.

[marishane.livejournal.com]

You make a good point. I had this professor who once told me that religion was created because of human's aversion to death and we all want to cling on to a hope of a better future. It does make sense.
Though right now I am still confused as to how I label my faith because I don't usually talk about it. But I'm raised by atheists sometimes agnostics parents so I guess I had somehow adopted their beliefs or nonbeliefs of a diety.
Seeing your article makes me lean towards the idea that humans created this God. It's very intriguing.

[(Anonymous)]

Your thoughts seem to have reason. But how do you know you can trust your thoughts?

Red Sky Boy's take...

[mishkwanakwad.livejournal.com]

Coming from the Western Hemisphere, I've seen a lot of religiosity. The USA is the land of the Freedom of Religion. It's there in the Bill of Rights as the very First Amendment. But I've had people in my life all across the board religiously. But talk about a land of double standards! They'll hang a picture of Moses in Congress, (Saw this cause, I saw Pope Francis mention it and point it out in his address) And yeah he may "make nice" with Jews and Muslims, but then he just Cannonized Junipero Serra, responsible for Californian Indigenous Genocide...he "cares" about Indigenous people, but only insomuch as we make "Good Converts" to Christianity.

So I say this "representative" of Yeshua, can just go back to Rome and "Pontificate" some more. His "Truth" is blind to Indigenous realities and peoples. We have always been seen as "part of the land", but we are Rising up! #RedTideRising #Native Lives Matter

I used to try to apply Biblical Standards to my life, but then I realized that it's like Louise Erdrich points out in her book "the Painted Drum" that book is rated R... I've tried to study with Mormons, Evangelicals, Roman Catholics and Lutherans and Baptists. Each of them believe something quite different from the other, and some like to "fight" the others...

I've come to the conclusion that while I'd like to believe....all evidence says that Christianity on the whole has been too diluted and diverted by contact with pre-Contact European paganism. (Hellenized, for lack of a better term.) Christianity started as a bunch of disparate groups, some more gnostic in flavor, some less so....just look at the history! Jesus chilled with Essenes and that's probably why he butted heads with the Jewish religious Establishment.

Do I really want to apply standards of genocide to my life? I don't think Jesus would want me to do that.

#Anishinaabe Pride

just saying hi

[ringlat.livejournal.com]

If you want to read about the clear evolution of one religion at least, you can read about Shinto (Japan's traditional religion) here:
https://archive.org/stream/shintothewayofth00astouoft#page/n15/mode/2up

You might see some racist talk but keep in mind he was writing this back in the end of the 1800's, lol. This guy could read both ancient and modern Japanese and Chinese, so he gathered as much info as he could from the oldest sources and compared it with the newer sources. It went from a religion that basically said "everything in nature that has some kind of power and can, say, harm you - ex. you can fall off a mountain, or you can drown in the sea - is a god", then it slowly moved on to personification of these natural things.

Then they started doing stuff like having "patron gods" for businesses and villages, and then since they talked about these gods as if they were family members (ex. how we say The Holy Father in English), people started misunderstanding and believing that they meant "my father is literally a god", which helped lead to plain old ancestor worship. At some point Buddhism was introduced to the country and then their religion got changed even more.

(That is, if I'm remembering right, I read it a while ago.)

Also, on Wikipedia I saw something about how almost 90% of people in the US are religious, I had no idea it was really that much before...

[turk152.livejournal.com]

So true!

It takes courage to believe ..

[airmarshall.livejournal.com]

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.

Con't

[airmarshall.livejournal.com]

The Pythagorean's and most of the orientals accepted the symbolical meaning, namely that the individual that lived below the level of his own humanity would return, not in an animal body physically, but on an animal level of human existence as an untutored, undisciplined, unmoralized creature. The next point that would come into focus would have to be what the theologian is concerned about namely what is it that moves through these bodies, is there a life that moves through races, nations, creatures, orders of existence, like a thread moving through a string of beads. Is there one life behind all apparent diversities of life, some theologians including Aquinas have been of the opinion that there is only one life, and that finally and ultimately that life is the life of deity. That there is only one source of life and one source of universal energy, and that is this intangible mysterious being, power or principle which we call God. Science has no substitute for this concept. Some scientists have attempted to explain the matter by assuming that life in its own nature is eternal, has no beginning and no end, that there never was the creation of the divine principle of things, which was a kind of great sea of eternal energy in which everything exists, has existed and will exist throughout eternity. This however does not satisfy a number of human concerns because this one energy has to be in some way conditioned, or various types of living things could not emerge from it. So it has been generally assumed, by the more thoughtful minded people, that in truth and substance the divine being consisting of complete, unconditioned, consciousness, intelligent energy has been at the source of existence. What this is in absolute definition we do not know, but we find it convenient, possible, and almost inevitable to regard it as deity, the one final, ultimate fact of existence. In order to determine the nature of deity, we would have to in one way or another become aware of its own existence and the purposes and motions which are innate in it, this brings us into philosophical speculations which are also rather difficult for modern science to accept. The problem is that to science the ultimate is a completely impersonal energy, to the theologian the ultimate is a purpose conscious energy, it is something that is alive, meaningful, and purposeful, it is not like the petrol or gasoline in a fuel tank, something simply to be used to move a machine, this life is the sovereignty of all things and we can return to Pythagoras to find out something about ancient knowledge about this subject. To the Pythagorean's and in their school of thinking there is, and always has been, only one life in space. This one life in space manifests to an infinity of differentiation's with everything that is conceivable or inconceivable to man is part of the potential of this one life, this one life is all and one, all as a total of everything that exists. In one life all things live and move and have their being.

This one life cannot be analyzed by any of the fragments of itself, but it is the source of all fragmentation, this one life is not only the source of all bodies, but of the minds, of souls, of spirits, and of every type of differentiation that exists in space. This one life then is the totality of all of the manifestations of itself, plus the nature of its own identity, which is known only to itself.

[bloxxerstudios.livejournal.com]

This is a very concering thought to a christian like me. It makes me think that maybe there isn't a god. Maybe there is no afterlife. Maybe there is no god. But there is also compelling evidence thast points towards God exsisting, and other evidence that points that there isn't a god.

So it shows that we can't trust ourselves or posts, there's too much evidence that supports both sides and it's impossible to tell which is right. Maybe my religion is wrong and there is no god. Or maybe my religion is correct and there is a god. Im saying that it's almost impossible to prove whicn side is correct. We can't prove ourselves correct, we can't prove to others that we're correct, we can't trust ourselves with this!

And yes I am a christian. And I believe that there is a god out there.