When I walked away from Christianity 30 years ago, I wasn't angry, I was sad. I really wanted a relationship with a personal god. The idea of a world without a god was scary to me. Now, I understand life. God was my Santa Claus. My Easter bunny. A rouse created to scare and fear me into acting how religion wants society to act. Those who left a religion, how many of you miss those days when you believed? Where you could give your cares to god, sin freely and ask for forgiveness, and look forward to your blissful eternity? Some days...
i have never been christian, and i never walked away from judaism per se -- just the god part (which yes is central, but there is an underlying humanism, and besides, i could never walk away from lox! i love lox!) i wasn't scared but i was a little sad. god had been my imaginary friend, a kind of confidante, and now he was, i realized, as fictional (and not half as innocent) as oliver twist. i don't actually miss that, though. my sadness was fleeting, and mild at that. but you see, i was not raised religiously. i knew i was jewish, but i never found out whether my folks believed in god or not, and never thought to ask, until i was an adult, living three thousand miles from them, and someone asked me what my parents believed. i had to call them long distance and ask in order to answer that question. when i did ask it, neither of them asked it of me, it now occurs to me. neither said "how about you?" it just wasn't an important issue to them (nor to me, but i was curious). i am sure had i been raised religiously i would have had a different kind of experience realizing at the age of 15 that i could not go on thinking there was a god. it wasn't traumatic at all, but it was certainly eye-opening. i can't long for ignorance; i suppose you can unlearn truth and embrace delusion, but i can't wish for that.
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p.s. there is no sinning freely and asking for forgiveness in judaism lol so i would have a hard time embracing that concept; it's not there for me to return to, at any rate!
Despite that I would not characterize my time in fundamentalism as traumatic or abusive (I lucked out in not being in one of the weirder sub-sects, and in having unconditionally loving parents who inadvertently innoculated me from the guilt-and-shame aspects) I still found the cognitive dissonance painful and frustrating, and was relieved to get away from it. My religious faith neither predicted nor explained lived outcomes, and in fact was for the most part spectacularly wrong. I was constantly embarrassed by televangelists, sexual predators and other hucksters that this part of Christianity was particularly adept and producing constantly. And so for those reasons alone, no, I didn't miss it.
On the other hand I'd be dishonest if I didn't admit to some wistful moments wishing that it had all been true somehow, that I really had that clear an understanding of how life works, and that good of an inside track on how to live it, that much of a leg up on most of the rest of humanity. I also didn't enjoy the amount of time and effort I had to spend prying religious thought habits out of my head with a crowbar, completely re-evaluating virtually every existential assumption I'd operated under, and figure out what I believed and thought about all that without outsourcing all the "thinking" to my fundamentalist overlords.
But that never lasted long or went very deep. Living life with far fewer surprises because my mental model of reality was a lot more accurate, was more than compensation for my trouble.
No way; we are our own gods!
Physics indicates that we are participating in creating our own universes/reality.
“Consciousness is fundamental, and matter is derived from consciousness." – Max Planck, theoretical physicist who originated quantum theory, 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics
“It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness.” Eugene Wigner, theoretical physicist and mathematician. He received a share of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963
“A fundamental conclusion of the new physics also acknowledges that the observer creates the reality. As observers, we are personally involved with the creation of our own reality. Physicists are being forced to admit that the universe is a “mental” construction.
Pioneering physicist Sir James Jeans wrote: “The stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter, we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.
Get over it, and accept the inarguable conclusion. The universe is immaterial-mental and spiritual.” – R.C. Henry, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University , “The Mental Universe” ; Nature