Question

[Black36]

Here's a question:

As I mentioned earlier, I'm a Bible believing Christian. Consistant with my belief claim, I believe that scripture is divinely inspired and it reveals certain truths about reality which could not be known without scripture. Therefore, I believe that all people KNOW that God is there, based on what is given in the first chapter of Romans. Basically, it says that all are without excuse, in terms of acknowledging the existence of God and that we all recognize that we have each violated the purpose of God, who we all know is there. The reason all are without excuse, according to scripture, is because we have all been given creation and conscience. Creation shows us that God is there, and conscience shows us that we have violated the purpose of God. I've said all this to ask the "atheist":

Have you ever truthfully thought that there was more to the physical reality we all share?

[Whitney]

I was raised christian and didn't move out of that belief till high school and didn't drop theism till a few years into college...so of course I thought there was more to it all back when I was still religious.

[xSilverPhinx]

All the time, but my thoughts have not lead me to any description of any god with possibly known attributes.

The gods of human religions have 'human' written all over them.

[Black36]

Greetings all!

I have been having a tough time lately in regards to my beliefs. I have always felt disconnected from the whole religion thing. I always gravitated towards science, math, logic, and reasoning. My family was not particularly religious, but we would attend church every once in awhile. During these times, I felt like I didn't belong. I was young and had no concept of not believing, just a feeling of disconnection from everyone else. When I got older, I became active in religion because I thought spirituality was missing from my life. I was on my way to being confirmed into the Catholic Church. I still held onto my beliefs of science and found out that even the priest was sure of evolution and the big bang!

I would leave that endeavor and not touch it again until I was 23/24. This time I went through the whole shebang, I had my first communion and was confirmed. During this time, I actually felt connected to the universe, but still something didn't feel right. I felt my prayers went unheeded. Not so much that they went "unanswered" (I hate that term, I mean God could just be saying, "No"), but I felt no one was listening.

I began to stop going. I figured I would go "native" and find spirituality on my own. I mean, I had faith and was a good person who did good things, I couldn't be on any ethereal shit-list.

That is how it stayed for 5 years. My wife and I had been trying to have another child for 6 years and one day we were surprised to find out that we would have another child. Elated, I thanked God for the blessing. That was the last time I said anything to any deity.

I don't know what changed, but I think I no longer believe that there is a God. I will you spare you all the same reasons everyone else seems to have about how they came to be an atheist, but I do have one question: Did any of you, who used to believe, but now don't, have a tough time coming to terms with your atheism?

I don't feel dejected or forsaken, I don't think I am even in denial, I just have this weird "limbo" feeling. I figured when I shed the mythology I would feel liberated, but I feel just a little off.

Is this something normally what happens? I mean, I know there is an adjustment phase. I was just inquiring how you all dealt with it.

Sorry for the ridiculously long post, I wanted to give brief history while trying to hit some key points about my journey.

Do you have doubts about atheism? If so, why?

[Black36]

How did you become a moderator?

I bought domain/hosting and uploaded the forum onto it  

So, you're the "creator" of this obviously designed, cyber-space reality, or did it just pop into existence ex nihilo?  

[Black36]

Hello.  I'm Willow from Manchester.
I have joined the forum because I'm tired of the isolation of being an atheist among a friendly Christian community.
Questioning everything and making up my own mind according to debate and research is hard work and I can see the comfort in obedience, but for the fact that it is irresponsible to just take the word of any one person or source without question.
I'm also a parent of two small children, and have the opinion that they didn't ask to be born and that I have a duty to them, but the reverse is not true.
Hello.
Willow.

Hello. How do you know when its right to stop questioning and just settle for a conclusion?

[Woody619]

No, I am not doubting Atheism. My original post may have seemed patchy and convoluted. I apologize, I was merely trying to get my thoughts out as quickly as I could.

No I was doubting my long held "faith". Some may call it a crisis of faith. While I see at the moment, I will probably not go back to it. I have tried to find God down many avenues and many faiths (whether I attempted to practice them or not). Each time, minus my confirmation, I felt outside of the faith. It was to the point I envied those who could believe so much and feel like they were connected to an ethereal being. Let me clarify that last statement by saying I envied the faith and not the religious persecution of homosexuals, women, abortion, and all other forms of zealotry and hypocrisy. I tried reaching out to those in the faith community to help me out. No one could give me a logical, reasonable point of view that could make me believe.

For a while, I took solace in the verse Proverbs 8:17, "I love them that love me; And those that seek me diligently shall find me." That maybe one day I will find the way. I also took solace in John Paul II's "Fides et Ratio" where it stipulated that faith and reason could coincide. I also knew that the Vatican Observatory has helped make some discoveries to the cosmos.

But, through all that, I simply cannot let my reason and logic accept that a God exists. Every religion is so quick to say the others' God does not exist or that that God is "dead" (i.e. Zeus). If all others are wrong, what makes the Abrahamic religions right?

I have more faith in my fellow citizens of this world to help out when things get tough than a deity.

My doubt stems from the fact that I feel foreign to everything right now. As I stated previously, I expected an adjustment phase. A phase when I would feel away from everyone. I am inquiring to the atheists out there in this forum, for the ones that once did believe in a higher power, how did it feel like to them when they became an atheist?

I must say, on a side note, this forum does seem to stick to the name. I'll admit, I was a bit hesitant about posting, but I see now that insecurity was moot.

[Asmodean]

Oh, I think there is more to the physical reality we share. Just look at the standing hypotheses in particle physics, for instance... There is a lot of fascinating stuff out there which we do not yet fully understand.

Yahweh and an army of angels, however..? That I call fiction.

[iSok]

It's an interesting question you raise Black36
For most people it's the most important question in life.
I myself certainly think there is something, death will be just a way to lift the veil.


People often see the wide range of religions as an obstacle for belief.
They tend to think: 'The Hindu thinks he is right, the Christian thinks he is right, the Muslim thinks he is right. So who's right?'.
However if you do study religions, different type of religions, you'll see that there is a hidden truth behind the outward belief.
That religions are all based on one absolute Truth, the outward belief is different, but a way to achieve the Truth.
The concept of Ying and Yang for example has a steady foundation in the way Islam looks at gender.

There's an interesting verse in the Qur'an to be found.

5:48 - To each of you We prescribed a law and a method. Had God willed, He would have made you one nation [united in religion], but [He intended] to test you in what He has given you; so race to [all that is] good. To God is your return all together, and He will [then] inform you concerning that over which you used to differ.

If you are interested in this, you should read the works of Frithjof Schuon, Charles Le Gai Eaton, Réne Guénon, Martin Lings and so on..

All the time, but my thoughts have not lead me to any description of any god with possibly known attributes.

The gods of human religions have 'human' written all over them.

The God of Islam is very different than any other religion, for a part the God of Spinoza, but personal of course.
Very different than the old man in the sky in popular culture. The Vision of Islam - William Chittick & Sachiko Murata.

[Asmodean]

you'll see that there is a hidden truth behind the outward belief.
That religions are all based on one absolute Truth, the outward belief is different, but a way to achieve the Truth.

One absolute truth, you say..? So which one absolute truth is more true, do you think..? My, your or some other guy's..?

[iSok]

you'll see that there is a hidden truth behind the outward belief.
That religions are all based on one absolute Truth, the outward belief is different, but a way to achieve the Truth.

One absolute truth, you say..? So which one absolute truth is more true, do you think..? My, your or some other guy's..?

The concept of the absolute Truth is quite vast Asmodean, I can't explain thoroughly in just a few words, but I'll try.
Basically it means to achieve a certain spiritual enlightenment. What Gautama Buddha for example did.
The end goal in each religion is the same, but the path is different.
Most people need a dogma to achieve this.

What makes all these people in common, is that they belief in a soul.
You on the other hand don't believe in the soul.


In case you are interested Asmodean.
The Transcendent Unity of Religions - Frithjof Schuon

[OldGit]

Have you ever truthfully thought that there was more to the physical reality we all share?

The snag is, B36, that if anyone answers 'yes' to that question, the Christian usually seizes on it and claims that proves the whole of his belief-system, lock, stock and barrel.  In fact, there's a huge gap.

I go along with Asmodean: stuff we don't know about - probably.  Your particular set of deranged illusions - no chance.

[Crow]

Not really no, I have never believed in a spirit/soul in fact, one of the main reasons I started to read and research religion was due to so many aligning there lives to these concepts whilst I never believed it to be true even though it was taught to me from a young age.

I think the connection we all share is no more than empathy, watch this video that explains mirror neurons.

The concept of Ying and Yang for example has a steady foundation in the way Islam looks at gender.

More like Islams view on gender has a "steady foundation" in yin yang. However I don't see the comparisons between the two, could you please elaborate on this?

[iSok]

Not really no, I have never believed in a spirit/soul in fact, one of the main reasons I started to read and research religion was due to so many aligning there lives to these concepts whilst I never believed it to be true even though it was taught to me from a young age.

I think the connection we all share is no more than empathy, watch this video that explains mirror neurons.

The concept of Ying and Yang for example has a steady foundation in the way Islam looks at gender.

More like Islams view on gender has a "steady foundation" in yin yang. However I don't see the comparisons between the two, could you please elaborate on this?

I'm quite busy these days Crow, I'll probably be back and active on the first of July.
I recently read a book called 'The Tao of Islam - Sachiko Murata & Annemarie Schimmel'
Here's a review of this book from Amazone.


In "The Tao of Islam" Sachiko Murata uses the lens of gender ideas in Islam to explore in a comparative religious framework the idea of a spirtual cosmology based on feminine and masculine principles. Although she is aware of the contemporary issues of women's legal status in Islam, she feels that such issues are not as fundamental as understanding the true role of gender within the cosmos. Those seeking arguments about whether the legal provisions of the Sharia (Islamic law) are or are not culpably sexist and what should be done about them if they are will not find much meat for their arguments in this book. Murata writes relatively clearly, and the writers she cites are often fascinating and insightful. They are, however, frequently prolix and I must say I found the book somewhat repetitive at times. (For this reason I gave the book 4 stars instead of 5.)

Professor Murata presents in this book a philosophy well-known to Platonism and which was also once familiar in the Christian West, but which is in danger of vanishing. In this philosophy, God, the cosmos (or the macrocosm), and the human self (microcosm) are the three great realities with the latter two stemming from and returning to God. The cosmos around us, and especially the human being in a superlative way, manifest as a kind of shadow the attributes of God. The highest purpose of studying the cosmos and the human self is thus to learn to recognize these manifestations of God's nature. Islamic writers in the Sufi Islamic tradition correlated these attributes into two fundamental families, that of majesty, awe, punishment, masculine, etc., and that of beauty, intimacy, mercy, feminine, etc. God is beautiful as well as majestic, intimate as well as awe-inspiring, merciful as well as punishing. Jalal (majesty) and jamal (beauty) are analogous to yang and yin of Chinese writings, while God matches the eternal Tao ("Way").

To manifest both His yang/jamal and His yin/jalal attributes visibly, God creates within the cosmos and human nature paired relations of yang-yin, jalal-jamal: heaven and earth, intellect and soul (both universal and in each person), spirit and nature, men and women. The productivity and fertility of these pairs is the sign of God's own abundance overflowing from His majesty and beauty. Things in the cosmos manifest these relations naturally, but human beings, having freedom, frequently damage these relation, with the yin elements rebelling against the yang and the yang elements forgetting their yin relation to God and tyrannizing over the yin.

As the creator and governor of all, God is primarily experienced by His creation naturally as powerful, active, and bright, i.e. jalal or yang. As a result God cannot normally be experienced by His creation but as a He, that is to say as manifesting yang/jalal attributes. Yet Sufi writers also recognize that God's Essence, apart from its relation with the cosmos, is like the true Tao mysterious, dark, and hidden from the sight and is thus in an absolute sense feminine. Yet such an understanding of God's yin/jamal nature must always be an esoteric understanding, compared to the exoteric understanding of God as yang/jalal.

Murata points out that the real enemy of this view of gender is not so much feminism (although feminism is certainly hostile to it), but the purely materialist vision of natural science. Materialism inquire only into mechanism, sees the cosmos and humanity as purposeless, and rejects the correlative thinking that sees the world around and inside us as keys to knowing God. Science has given us so much new knowledge about creation, yet we have not yet made sense of it as God's creation, demonstrating His attributes.

As Murata acknowledges, Islam's gendered cosmology is only one, albeit strikingly clear and articulate, contribution in the long tradition of spiritual cosmology. Murata compares Islamic cosmology to the Tao but her treatment of "Taoism" is the weakest part of the book. Her main source for "Taoism" is a superficial reading of the Yijing (I ching), but the Yijing is quite as much Confucian as it is Taoist, if not more (see the twelfth-century Neo-Confucian anthology "Reflections on Things at Hand" translated by Hok-lam Chan). Murata adheres closely to the ABC rule for modern spiritual writers ("anything but Christianity"), but the Christian readers will find in this book thought-provoking parallels to the several pairs of creation (light-dark, dry-wet, man-woman etc.) in Genesis 1, the feminine Wisdom as God's instrument in creation in Proverbs 8, the divine-human marriage language in Psalm 45 and Ephesians 5, and the structuring duality of works (jalal/yang) and grace (jamal/yin), Law and Gospel, Moses and Christ in St. Paul's epistles and St. John's gospel. Those involved in the debates over gender and sexuality now wracking parts of the Christian church will find Murata's book a powerful reminder that gender is not something under human control that we can remake as we wish--instead human gender is only one reflection of the fundamentally gendered fabric of the cosmos, itself made by God.

[Whitney]

Hello.  I'm Willow from Manchester.
I have joined the forum because I'm tired of the isolation of being an atheist among a friendly Christian community.
Questioning everything and making up my own mind according to debate and research is hard work and I can see the comfort in obedience, but for the fact that it is irresponsible to just take the word of any one person or source without question.
I'm also a parent of two small children, and have the opinion that they didn't ask to be born and that I have a duty to them, but the reverse is not true.
Hello.
Willow.

Hello. How do you know when its right to stop questioning and just settle for a conclusion?

black, if you ask another question related to religion before you reach 50 posts I'm going to start deleting your questions so that they won't add to your 50.