HOW DO YOU GET THERE FROM HERE: ATHEISM FROM BELIEF IN GOD AND RELIGION

With the current usage of the Internet, people don't have to wait two years to get something 'polished' about their thoughts, research results, or anything else they want to share with the world and from which they get instant feedback.  The route to Atheism used to be a much lonelier journey,  Most all children are exposed to the religion of their parents very early in life.  To deviate from that indoctrination and the often ostracism from parents for doing so is a notable.deterrent to voicing one's lack of religious belief in today's world.

There are those who believe you are born an Atheist though there is nothing yet found in brain research to confirm this, and those who are shocked to think that others do not believe in their God..  What is more likely is that some of us are born with a need to prove everything we believe, just as an infant learns to taste and bite everything to understand or later recognize it. 

Religion is replete with doctrines, under the name of God's word, which would suggest that God changed 'it's' mind as often as Mitt Romney changes political stances.  Just as we have people trained to translate the Constitution, to make it fit today's world, the Bible has become obsolete by its advanced age.  What made sense in the year 1 AD might not fit in today's world.  I do not know if anyone has ever financed good solid follow-up research to see if those 'we trust in God' make out any better in life, overall, than Atheists. 

Recently, Valerie Terico wrote an interesting article on  How I Left My Evangelical Christian Faith.  To read just how one person reached her own conclusions, click here.

BEING TOLD I MUST HAVE FAITH TURNED ME OFF TO ORGANIZED RELIGION MANY DECADES AGO.

In my head and thoughts, I have probably been an atheist most of my life, though never thought of it as a religion or that is took me out of the baptismal realm which I wore shortly after my birth. My awareness that I could not believe in any of the churches which I had attended started before I ended my first ten years..  I went to a Community Church in the Midwest when my children were young because I thought they needed a foundation in which to believe or to rebel, as they saw fit when they could think about it. I enjoyed the sermons somewhat as I had enjoyed some of my college professors but it did not connect to my early religious church experiences where fasting and communion were a requirement, where the services were conducted in what to me was a foreign language, and where my boredom had me counting men's bald heads and ceiling tiles to be able to continue sitting there..

More recently, as decade after decade passesin my life, I realize that I remain not at all convinced that Man is the highest power in the universe;  nor do I believe that God created Man in 'his' image, nor can I make myself believe in the man-written Bible, Kuran, Talmud or whatever of any religion I have read about.

Many of my friends, which should not come as a surprise, are many for whom I have a great deal of respect as people who live moral and ethical lives and are Atheists.  It has never occurred to me to think too much about my beliefs defining who I am...I just am.  Because the forms I filled out never had a space for' Atheist' until recently, I always defined myself as a member of the faith in which I had been christened as an infant... that of my parents, though I never attended church, prayed, or respected the rituals of the church as soon as I was old enough to begin to question what I was seeing and exposed to...communion, holy water, holy bread, incense making my asthma flare up, and hosts of other impositions to my view of reality.

Today, I read an interesting article in AlterNet: 10 myths about Atheism.  I would not just copy it and cannot and will not claim it as my own, other than that I found it something with which I could relate.  To read this article, click here.

WHY AND HOW DO ATHEISTS EXIST?

Having heard that 'God is Good' all my life, I find it difficult that we are here to atone for the sins of our forebears back to Adam and Eve, the fantasy of religion.. Recently I found someone who writes a thought provoking blog on the subject of Atheism.   Greta Christina who, once a Christian, is now a confirmed Atheist along with a much larger majority than dare speak out publicly in this country which still chooses 'In God We Trust' when, in fact, most people trust no one any longer, .

Having read Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Shermer and many others, the attempted line between agnostic and atheist means little to me.  If one chooses to read 'atheist' as an agnostic who does not believe in the Christian God, or any of the Gods currently mentioned in the religions of today's worlds, atheist sounds apt to me.  From a site which chose the 50 most brilliant Atheists of all time, it is fascinating to see the span of minds from ancient Greek philosophers to Nehru, Freud, Carl Sagan, Warren Buffet, Katherine Hepburn, and so many recognizable names.

Today our political society is still so cowed by religious fanatics it is said to be unlikely that a President of the US could be elected as an atheist, if one tried.  Christopher Hitchins, whom I find brilliant but abrasive, believes that all wars are started by religion.  I thoroughly believed this until recently, not looking behind as to the cause, when a minister (with whom I was in a discussion questioning religion and the Bible)  made the most sense to me when he said it was not religion that started wars but power hungry men who used religion to start wars.  I took this a bit further and realized religion is started by power hungry men who then use it to start wars.  Since the 1890s, the off-shoot group from the Mormon Church, Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints, crazed, women hating sexists, polygamists who have tortured and brain washed women, now having inbred so much they have a medical problem of vast proportions.

It would seem to me if  our government (Congress or whoever wants to study the problem)made it impossible to start a church legally without careful consideration or by putting  a limitation on all the crack pots who have found they can bleed the public by founding religious temples (as Haggert had until he was forced to resign when his hypocrisy became known,) or no longer making it possible to start a new religion.  Since they can offer no proof of the high power calling, it a religion ought to be forbidden.  The term cult comes from a Latin word that means caring...it, too, seems to have been sliding off course, remembering the Jones fiasco.  People can too easily be brainwashed.  Marketers and leaders of religions carry the same skills...they are con artists.  Their disciples, having been brain washed are less toxic and there are even some honest (actually helping people who cannot feel in control of their lives by themselves)  There are many truly good and selfless people out there, but I believe they would still be out there doing good, church or not..

Google has many resources.  Just Google 'how does religion help people'

WHY DO THEY ALL TOPPLE OFF THEIR PEDESTALS?

Christopher Hitchens has a mind I have admired for a long time, primarily after reading his book, God is Not Great. He is a brilliant historian and writes well (since he agrees with me) on God. However, after seeing him on TV panels I have to confess his personality is as fetching as Ann Coulter's. When I heard that he is a neocon/warmonger, he immediately toppled off the pedestal.

He is not, by far, the first to take a dive. Some people talk well and make interesting points. This is wonderful to help the rest of us think out of our box. He is provocative and his expressed thoughts really push the envelope. However, it was surprising to hear that this pro-Iraq war supporter has taken this length of time to change a view that the majority of Americans have held for a long time. It took him only 11 seconds to realize that waterboarding is torture. Perhaps he should experience more directly before he forms such authoritative opinions about which he so pedantically lectures on panels.

An article by Alexander Linklater, having interviewed him, writes more accurately than anything I could write. Now I understand why I unconsciously related him to Ann Coulter. Both of them like to stir up controversy and shock. While Coulter is petty, nasty, and even more insulting than he...it seems he is taking lessons from her by such comments (to quote Linklater) as: "His aptitude for the iconoclastic flourish—describing Princess Diana and Mother Teresa at their deaths, for example, as, respectively, "a simpering Bambi narcissist and a thieving fanatical Albanian dwarf"—sustained his currency as an intellectual shock troop of the left."

FEAR OF DYING VS FEAR OF DEATH

Today I heard Terry Gross interview Susan Sonntag's son, who wrote a book about his mother's dying. Christopher Hitchens writes in memory of this great intellectual, who leaves quite an intellectual legacy. The son said his mother was afraid of dying, which he really didn't quite understand and seemed somewhat surprised because she had been in Sarijevo when people were being randomly shot and in constant danger of her life. He could not explain the incongruity, but I suggest that fear of dying is not necessarily fear of death, but the process of dying.

Susan Sonntag was a true atheist to the end. She was not afraid of a hereafter. There are many of us who believe that we go through this life once and death means oblivion. The thought of oblivion does not strike fear in my heart. Susan Sonntag had cancer three times and suffered great physical pain. Her dying was painful through treatments and her body's reaction to them. I would thus suggest from my own clinical experience, in therapy with many patients over the years, that those who do not fear a hereafter fear the process of dying, not death itself.

In that process they lose total control of their lives, of living. Once the term terminal illness is invoked, there is no hope for a future that continues to allow all the things one may want to accomplish to continue. Ms Gross played a tape of an interview with Susan Sonntag before her death in which she spoke of the pain her illness was causing those around her whom she loved, especially her son, and that grieved her. As only those who have intimate experience with Hospice or a dying loved one have experienced, when one knows there is a limited time to live, there is little psychic energy left to be a mentor, caretaker, advisor, or any of the roles one may have had in life. Loved ones may feel unloved and deserted if they don't understand this, hurt and disappointed and pull away from the dying person.

The fear, then, of dying is the reaction to the knowledge that when you die you will cause sadness and suffering to those people who cared for you in life. The person not only has to deal with their own thoughts and adjustment to death, but the pain of all those around who are grieving as well, trying to hold on, angry at the dying person for leaving them, and lots of other somewhat less rational reactions. Some people die without pain but that is not the usual picture. Lots of people die in excruciating pain, which our laws only recently have allowed physicians to alleviate properly. Palliative care covers pain and also takes away energy and the ability to carry on the mental tasks one might wish to perform. Some suffer with cancer or illnesses causing dementia, loss of memory, loss of speech or physical movement, and worse.

Until laws no longer prevent people from choosing to end their own suffering, alone or with medical assistance, I assert that it is greater fear of dying and not death, which religious people think will unite them with loved ones who have preceded them in death.