Good one, Terry - "Disbelief is opening your eyes and understanding the darkness". That's the hard part.
Coping with becoming an atheist?
by Crazyguy 43 Replies latest jw friends
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Apognophos
I was saddened when I realized that I didn't see any evidence of a loving God because it meant that he wasn't going to fix everything. The main reason I wanted to believe, as a JW, was to see justice brought to the world -- the wrongfully killed being resurrected, disease being eliminated, etc. Later I realized that God put all the billions of people who've ever lived in this situation in the first place, according to the Bible, because our first parents made one mistake. So the Bible God was never all that just to begin with.
Although that was a sad realization, I also worried a bit about how I could cope without God. What eventually hit me, Crazyguy, was that I had been coping all this time without him already! Whether or not he existed, he certainly hadn't been answering my prayers when I was a JW teen trying to live up to an impossible standard. So even though at the time, I'd thought I needed him, if he didn't exist, then that means I got this far without him! So now I just had to cultivate a slightly less dependent personality and stifle the urge to pray to someone else for help, and just work on finding the solution to a problem myself.
I suppose I never banked much on the hope of an afterlife. It all seemed so remote to me, even an earthly life in paradise. What would we do? Without conflict, how could we create anything interesting? So giving up that future hope actually freed me to make more of this life, in the here and now.
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talesin
Belief is closing your eyes and declaring you can see.
Disbelief is opening your eyes and understanding the darkness.
I just love this, Terry. That's a great illustration. :))
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rebel8
It can also be freeing, exhilirating even.
You are free from the shackles of mythology now. You can look life in the eye and get to know him for who he really is.
Your curiosity can be fueled. Learn about sciency stuff. Try to wrap your head around us being star stuff. Think about the sociology of belief, how that develops and why. It's really cool actually.