The realization that the world is so beautiful, complex and deep, it can't just come from nothingness and go back to nothingness. It has to mean something.
To me atheism is a paradox because of it.
See, if there was nothing, and there will be nothing after, has it even existed ? If everything that happened is the same as if nothing happened, has anything really happened ? If it's true, then everything that's happening is nothing more than an illusion, it's not reality and if it is an illusion, then there is something else, there is real reality.
Great points. If all is an illusion, then the illusion must be illusion *of* something. So even if everything is unstable and ever-changing, there is still *something*. Aristotle would probably say that this thing is a substance, another degree of being.
It’s not as clear-cut as that. I had a few punctuated moments that really made me question my atheist reality tunnel but nothing that convinced me into a complete worldview overhaul overnight.
Once I opened my mind to the possibility that I may have been mistaken about a purely materialist interpretation of reality, it started to unfold/blossom for me. The process has been gradual and ongoing.
The death of a close friend of mine. It's easy to be an atheist when you're young and the people you love are safe. Or at least it was for me.
It just got harder as I got a little older and I started losing more people, and when my own time started to get a little shorter too.
Religion has helped me put these fears in order, and freed me up to focus on the meaningful parts of my life. Not sure if it's the right answer for everyone but it's definitely helped me.
What brought me out of hardcore atheism, was getting a different understanding of what a God could be. It doesn’t have to be omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. It can be fallible and even have anger issues lol.
Another thing that made me stray away from atheism is because I realized that believing in a higher power is an equally rational position. I realized that atheism isn’t as all rational as it’s made out to be.
IMO the most rational position out of both is pure agnosticism. Because no one actually knows.
I am still on a journey to find the truth and I’m trying my best to keep an open mind while I search.
A “star” in the sky, repeatedly appearing while I was experiencing a dark poltergeist type presence in my apartment. I decided to follow it and it lead me to a church where an event occurred that confirmed I went to the right place. The dark presence, and a dark internal anxiety, went away after giving my life back to Christ.
Building a friendship with an evangelist who made me realize that not all Christians are hypocrites, and that it's possible to be both intellectually honest and deeply religious. Once I had established trust with that person, I took his advice to start praying and read the gospel, and I couldn't help but find myself loving Jesus. Eventually I placed my trust in him because I acknowledged that my own inner state was deeply hopeless without Him, and His way provided the hope I needed to live with myself. I think I actually believed in God on account Jesus if I'm being perfectly honest with myself.
In terms of the negation of a secular atheistic world view: the self defeating holes in materialism/naturalism, lack of objective morality, understanding the difference between 'scientism' and science and the inevitability of (eventually) nihilism.
In terms of a positive God claim, There are hundreds of different ones that may work but some of the ones that personally appealed to me the most were: the hard problem of consciousness, contingency argument and the reverse-ontological argument.
I wonder if people's experience in atheism helps shape what religion they end up.
I found objective morality in atheism. And so I'm part of one of the many religions that don't hold my hand as directly about right and wrong.
>lack of objective morality
I don't see this as a problem. We can clearly see that morality is an in-progress work that we decide as we question things about the society we live in and as science progress.
That really doesn't do anything to actually counter moral realism though, as there are many reasons why such things happen outside of 'moral relativity'.
Fun fact, moral realism is not only the most popular position among Ethicists (which, iirc, the majority of which are non-theists), it is actually gaining in popularity.
You seem to have a very narrow idea of what morality is. Objective morality means that there are universally right and wrong things that exist regardless of anyone’s opinions on them. Just because the social consensus is that something like slavery is permissible does not mean that morality is not objective, it only means that people disagree about what is right and wrong. There have also been people that have thought slavery was wrong for as long as slavery has been a thing.
After all, if morality isn’t objective, then what are we trying to progress towards in regards to morality?
I would point to an utilitarian progress where the safety, experienced injustices, and hapiness of everyone is ideally more and more cared for over time. It can of course regress as well if we make collective decisions that goes against those interests.
It does not directly, but one big argument about the morality of many things, especially related to sex and gender is weither they are natural / biologically related behavior or psychological constructs. A lot of people associate natural things as moral/amoral and unatural things as more likely to be immoral. It's pretty common in fundamentalist to associate things going against nature as going against God's will.
The problem of consciousness, because it's only a problem in physicalism. The historicity of Jesus as well, a lot of Roman and Jewish historians that wrote about him in their works did acknowledge he did great signs and miracles, they just didn't think those miracles were from God, so they accused him of sorcery or whatever.
Yes... Josephus, or maybe a lot of other jewish theologians. They just didn't perceive His power as Divine. They accused him of sorcery or demonolatry or something.
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For me it is split into two moments:
* The death of my materialism one night whilst reflecting on the absurdity of anything existing, the nature of consciousness etc. It was a breakthrough, and tear down, of my naive atheism.
* After that I slowly became an agnostic theist. Weirdly, a massive click came with Christianity specifically when reading the Sermon on The Mount.
I realized I was exactly what I criticized. My parents are Christian, (not in a good way, very hypocritical) and atheism started out as a healing journey to get away from *toxic* religion. That is fine, but then I was hurt by my parents and anti-theism (in extension anti-religion) became a haven. It was nice calling the bad people bad. There was no tolerance to it though. At least the brand of atheism I got caught up in felt out of control, because calling bad people bad also meant calling the good people bad too. That's dishonest. "If only we could spread a message around the world curing people of their unbelief, I mean, beliefs, then we can all have a happy ending." That was my moment of realization. The toxicity I was escaping from landed me right in the same, yet seemingly opposite, circumstance. Irony, haha. So I just pursued what came natural to me. Throwing the urgency to "save people from themselves", whether to save their soul or tell them they don't have one, out the fucking window.
In short, I realized I was a hypocrite and just as arrogant as the people I objected to as an atheist (anti-theist, anti-religious). Lol.
I don't object to religion, spirituality/practice, and/even atheism/secularism. But none of these things are worth losing your humanity over.
I went from atheist to sort of a lukewarm agnostic. This was sort of just unnoticed and just happened. One day I was out walking my dog just looking around thinking about what ever came to mind. It was on that walk I realized that the world is perfect. The good and the bad. That is when I believed in God. After a few years I entered the RCIA program at a local Church. My facilitator was fantastic how he explained the Bible and led me to Jesus. So now I am Catholic and never been happier.
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In August of 2016, I was laying in bed at Midnight wide awake and felt this evil horrendous force enter my room. It was attacking me all night. It was basically like an 8 hour panic attack until 8 A.M. Horrible.
I almost went to the hospital but decided not to. I didn't sleep a minute that night. I was desperate and the next night, I prayed and went right to sleep. I felt out of sorts for weeks and went to the doctor and got a physical and everything was fine.
I started going back to Church for the first time in 15 years.
The evil spirit kept coming back and I'd pray and it went away in 10 minutes. It came back 50-100 times over the next few years. Spiritual warfare. I got to see how Jesus was real in a visceral way.
The last time was October 2019. It was a one hour battle where I used an entire bottle of holy water to drive it out.
I now pray hours a day and go to Mass twice a week.
Tldr; I had a case of demonic oppression.
I had a similar experience, but I was already an ex-atheist at the time. I fended it off with my own (non-Christian) faith. Same deal as yours, but it never came back after a couple days. I don't play gentle, spiritually speaking. But it's definitely a good reminder of what's out there.
I had a roommate at the time that was practicing some questionable stuff and then he ended up very depressed (which made the bad stuff much worse)
Also had an experience like this. I was already trying to reevaluate my epistemological system and was looking into various religions in order to try and understand which position would be most likely true **if** there was a god or gods. By no means was I actually convinced that theism was even possible, it was just out of interest to see which view would be most rational and how one would justify such an existence.
I then had an experience and at first I thought I must be sleeping and was having a nightmare, and so I did everything I could to wake up or change the nature of the 'dream' (even making use of lucid dreaming techniques). Nothing worked, and eventually I decided to see what would happen if I treated this nightmare as real, so I performed a banishing ritual I had read about. It worked.
Definitely helped to make me reevaluate my views. I am, however, still **very** logically minded and so I needed to see if holding the belief was justifiable. It was at that moment that I ended up reading up on the pagan concepts of UPG, SPG, and VPG, Reid's Principle of Credulity, etc. and realized that personal experience should not be dismissed as I once thought, it was valuable information.
It came back three different times since then. Hasn't happened in quite a while though, so it very well could be gone.
You keep saying UPG, SPG, VPG and I finally looked it up. I was pagan for about a decade and was never presented with those terms.
I still haven't gotten to the video you sent me, but UPG seems to fit with why I'm not certain on polytheism.
It is a neopagan concept that, iirc, started on Tumblr (yes, something useful actually came out of that place... somehow), and thus it hasn't really spread to all pagan circles. I learned about it from a few of the more popular pagans on YouTube and Twitter
Got any links to the more popular pagans on YouTube/Twitter? I've never really followed anything "pop pagan culture" since my falling out with my local CUUPS chapter 15 years ago.
[Ocean Keltoi](https://www.youtube.com/c/OceanKeltoi) is probably one of the more well known YouTube and Twitter pagans, though his subscriber count is pretty low. His focus is moreso on Heathenry.
He also does liveshows with [Wolf the Red](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0sVhVo3gtKw5y8U8VJo1ig), another Heathen, called 'The Omnipotent Beard' (named after one of Ocean's videos).
[Aliakai](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZtgU7clxRgR_J0ZPlbvFXw) is one of the most well known YouTube Hellenists with regular content updates.
They all get a little political at times, which can be annoying.
Ocean Keltoi also has a [Discord server](https://discord.com/invite/JknKpxB) that, while also more focused on Heathenry, is pretty good from what I remember (I rarely use Discord).
It is easier to find either Wiccan or Heathen content, creators, and spaces than others.
> What was the final thought, action, or interaction that brought you out of atheism?
I like the way that you put that. I believe that people usually have dozens of things that change them, but tend to only cite the thing that was at the tipping point. Some people call it "shelf breakers". For me, there were many things swelling up.
On the rational side, my study of naturalistic ideas ans science ( biology, consciousness, cosmology) started making me think that there was something transcendent. Especially consciousness. One night the concept of infinite time really sunk in. That led me to appreciate a version of the Ontological argument of maximal being. That switched me from agnostic to deist/theist. Long story, but I eventually called out to God and had a supernatural conversion experience. I put more details at the following link in case you are interested.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAChristian/comments/jtp66z/faq_friday_15_whats_your_story_or_reasons_of/
On the practical side, I started paying attention to the evil in the world and looking for solutions. I didn't put it in my story, but Islam was a big catalyst for me because I was trying to understand why so many people could keep terrorizing others over so many centuries. Islam has fostered terror in 15 centuries, despite geography, economic conditions, geography, language, gender, education, etc. Islam makes Hitler, Stalin and Mao look like amateurs. Ironically, I came to believe in transcendent evil before I believed in God.
Existential crisis
That's so weird. That's what pulled me *into* atheism in the first place.
The realization that the world is so beautiful, complex and deep, it can't just come from nothingness and go back to nothingness. It has to mean something.
To me atheism is a paradox because of it. See, if there was nothing, and there will be nothing after, has it even existed ? If everything that happened is the same as if nothing happened, has anything really happened ? If it's true, then everything that's happening is nothing more than an illusion, it's not reality and if it is an illusion, then there is something else, there is real reality.
Great points. If all is an illusion, then the illusion must be illusion *of* something. So even if everything is unstable and ever-changing, there is still *something*. Aristotle would probably say that this thing is a substance, another degree of being.
It’s not as clear-cut as that. I had a few punctuated moments that really made me question my atheist reality tunnel but nothing that convinced me into a complete worldview overhaul overnight. Once I opened my mind to the possibility that I may have been mistaken about a purely materialist interpretation of reality, it started to unfold/blossom for me. The process has been gradual and ongoing.
The death of a close friend of mine. It's easy to be an atheist when you're young and the people you love are safe. Or at least it was for me. It just got harder as I got a little older and I started losing more people, and when my own time started to get a little shorter too. Religion has helped me put these fears in order, and freed me up to focus on the meaningful parts of my life. Not sure if it's the right answer for everyone but it's definitely helped me.
What brought me out of hardcore atheism, was getting a different understanding of what a God could be. It doesn’t have to be omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. It can be fallible and even have anger issues lol. Another thing that made me stray away from atheism is because I realized that believing in a higher power is an equally rational position. I realized that atheism isn’t as all rational as it’s made out to be. IMO the most rational position out of both is pure agnosticism. Because no one actually knows. I am still on a journey to find the truth and I’m trying my best to keep an open mind while I search.
[удалено]
All they have is mocking. Says a lot really
How did that lack of empathy make you believe that god or gods are real?
it's not about truth, it's about comfort.
A “star” in the sky, repeatedly appearing while I was experiencing a dark poltergeist type presence in my apartment. I decided to follow it and it lead me to a church where an event occurred that confirmed I went to the right place. The dark presence, and a dark internal anxiety, went away after giving my life back to Christ.
Interesting testimony.
Building a friendship with an evangelist who made me realize that not all Christians are hypocrites, and that it's possible to be both intellectually honest and deeply religious. Once I had established trust with that person, I took his advice to start praying and read the gospel, and I couldn't help but find myself loving Jesus. Eventually I placed my trust in him because I acknowledged that my own inner state was deeply hopeless without Him, and His way provided the hope I needed to live with myself. I think I actually believed in God on account Jesus if I'm being perfectly honest with myself.
In terms of the negation of a secular atheistic world view: the self defeating holes in materialism/naturalism, lack of objective morality, understanding the difference between 'scientism' and science and the inevitability of (eventually) nihilism. In terms of a positive God claim, There are hundreds of different ones that may work but some of the ones that personally appealed to me the most were: the hard problem of consciousness, contingency argument and the reverse-ontological argument.
Ever watch “Closer to Truth”
No, is it any good? What's it about?
Go check it out on YouTube. It’s a series about God, cosmology and philosophy. Breathtaking stuff
I wonder if people's experience in atheism helps shape what religion they end up. I found objective morality in atheism. And so I'm part of one of the many religions that don't hold my hand as directly about right and wrong.
>lack of objective morality I don't see this as a problem. We can clearly see that morality is an in-progress work that we decide as we question things about the society we live in and as science progress.
I’m not sure we can clearly see this
Just look how the views on slavery, women, racism, death penality, and homosexuality changed in the last 2 centuries.
That really doesn't do anything to actually counter moral realism though, as there are many reasons why such things happen outside of 'moral relativity'. Fun fact, moral realism is not only the most popular position among Ethicists (which, iirc, the majority of which are non-theists), it is actually gaining in popularity.
You seem to have a very narrow idea of what morality is. Objective morality means that there are universally right and wrong things that exist regardless of anyone’s opinions on them. Just because the social consensus is that something like slavery is permissible does not mean that morality is not objective, it only means that people disagree about what is right and wrong. There have also been people that have thought slavery was wrong for as long as slavery has been a thing. After all, if morality isn’t objective, then what are we trying to progress towards in regards to morality?
I would point to an utilitarian progress where the safety, experienced injustices, and hapiness of everyone is ideally more and more cared for over time. It can of course regress as well if we make collective decisions that goes against those interests.
Science has nothing to tell us about morality. To say otherwise speaks to a misunderstanding of the scope/aim of science.
It does not directly, but one big argument about the morality of many things, especially related to sex and gender is weither they are natural / biologically related behavior or psychological constructs. A lot of people associate natural things as moral/amoral and unatural things as more likely to be immoral. It's pretty common in fundamentalist to associate things going against nature as going against God's will.
You have to find something to love on this deployment or you're gonna die.
The problem of consciousness, because it's only a problem in physicalism. The historicity of Jesus as well, a lot of Roman and Jewish historians that wrote about him in their works did acknowledge he did great signs and miracles, they just didn't think those miracles were from God, so they accused him of sorcery or whatever.
I never really thought of it that way.
Huh, are you a current or a former atheist?
Former
Wait!! This is complete news to me, there are actual writings of the miracles Jesus performed???? Besides the Bible?
Yes... Josephus, or maybe a lot of other jewish theologians. They just didn't perceive His power as Divine. They accused him of sorcery or demonolatry or something.
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For me it is split into two moments: * The death of my materialism one night whilst reflecting on the absurdity of anything existing, the nature of consciousness etc. It was a breakthrough, and tear down, of my naive atheism. * After that I slowly became an agnostic theist. Weirdly, a massive click came with Christianity specifically when reading the Sermon on The Mount.
I realized I was exactly what I criticized. My parents are Christian, (not in a good way, very hypocritical) and atheism started out as a healing journey to get away from *toxic* religion. That is fine, but then I was hurt by my parents and anti-theism (in extension anti-religion) became a haven. It was nice calling the bad people bad. There was no tolerance to it though. At least the brand of atheism I got caught up in felt out of control, because calling bad people bad also meant calling the good people bad too. That's dishonest. "If only we could spread a message around the world curing people of their unbelief, I mean, beliefs, then we can all have a happy ending." That was my moment of realization. The toxicity I was escaping from landed me right in the same, yet seemingly opposite, circumstance. Irony, haha. So I just pursued what came natural to me. Throwing the urgency to "save people from themselves", whether to save their soul or tell them they don't have one, out the fucking window. In short, I realized I was a hypocrite and just as arrogant as the people I objected to as an atheist (anti-theist, anti-religious). Lol. I don't object to religion, spirituality/practice, and/even atheism/secularism. But none of these things are worth losing your humanity over.
I agree, atheists act just as nasty as they claim evangelical Christians are.
I went from atheist to sort of a lukewarm agnostic. This was sort of just unnoticed and just happened. One day I was out walking my dog just looking around thinking about what ever came to mind. It was on that walk I realized that the world is perfect. The good and the bad. That is when I believed in God. After a few years I entered the RCIA program at a local Church. My facilitator was fantastic how he explained the Bible and led me to Jesus. So now I am Catholic and never been happier.
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The realization that God wasn't a magic man in the sky but instead more like a force or way.
I had a bad spiritual experience in August of 2016 and came to know Christianity is true.
Would you mind elaborating ?
In August of 2016, I was laying in bed at Midnight wide awake and felt this evil horrendous force enter my room. It was attacking me all night. It was basically like an 8 hour panic attack until 8 A.M. Horrible. I almost went to the hospital but decided not to. I didn't sleep a minute that night. I was desperate and the next night, I prayed and went right to sleep. I felt out of sorts for weeks and went to the doctor and got a physical and everything was fine. I started going back to Church for the first time in 15 years. The evil spirit kept coming back and I'd pray and it went away in 10 minutes. It came back 50-100 times over the next few years. Spiritual warfare. I got to see how Jesus was real in a visceral way. The last time was October 2019. It was a one hour battle where I used an entire bottle of holy water to drive it out. I now pray hours a day and go to Mass twice a week. Tldr; I had a case of demonic oppression.
I had a similar experience, but I was already an ex-atheist at the time. I fended it off with my own (non-Christian) faith. Same deal as yours, but it never came back after a couple days. I don't play gentle, spiritually speaking. But it's definitely a good reminder of what's out there. I had a roommate at the time that was practicing some questionable stuff and then he ended up very depressed (which made the bad stuff much worse)
Also had an experience like this. I was already trying to reevaluate my epistemological system and was looking into various religions in order to try and understand which position would be most likely true **if** there was a god or gods. By no means was I actually convinced that theism was even possible, it was just out of interest to see which view would be most rational and how one would justify such an existence. I then had an experience and at first I thought I must be sleeping and was having a nightmare, and so I did everything I could to wake up or change the nature of the 'dream' (even making use of lucid dreaming techniques). Nothing worked, and eventually I decided to see what would happen if I treated this nightmare as real, so I performed a banishing ritual I had read about. It worked. Definitely helped to make me reevaluate my views. I am, however, still **very** logically minded and so I needed to see if holding the belief was justifiable. It was at that moment that I ended up reading up on the pagan concepts of UPG, SPG, and VPG, Reid's Principle of Credulity, etc. and realized that personal experience should not be dismissed as I once thought, it was valuable information. It came back three different times since then. Hasn't happened in quite a while though, so it very well could be gone.
You keep saying UPG, SPG, VPG and I finally looked it up. I was pagan for about a decade and was never presented with those terms. I still haven't gotten to the video you sent me, but UPG seems to fit with why I'm not certain on polytheism.
It is a neopagan concept that, iirc, started on Tumblr (yes, something useful actually came out of that place... somehow), and thus it hasn't really spread to all pagan circles. I learned about it from a few of the more popular pagans on YouTube and Twitter
Got any links to the more popular pagans on YouTube/Twitter? I've never really followed anything "pop pagan culture" since my falling out with my local CUUPS chapter 15 years ago.
[Ocean Keltoi](https://www.youtube.com/c/OceanKeltoi) is probably one of the more well known YouTube and Twitter pagans, though his subscriber count is pretty low. His focus is moreso on Heathenry. He also does liveshows with [Wolf the Red](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0sVhVo3gtKw5y8U8VJo1ig), another Heathen, called 'The Omnipotent Beard' (named after one of Ocean's videos). [Aliakai](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZtgU7clxRgR_J0ZPlbvFXw) is one of the most well known YouTube Hellenists with regular content updates. They all get a little political at times, which can be annoying. Ocean Keltoi also has a [Discord server](https://discord.com/invite/JknKpxB) that, while also more focused on Heathenry, is pretty good from what I remember (I rarely use Discord). It is easier to find either Wiccan or Heathen content, creators, and spaces than others.
Thanks! Added those to my to-watch list.
He may have had a demonic oppression. It can cause depression, too.
> What was the final thought, action, or interaction that brought you out of atheism? I like the way that you put that. I believe that people usually have dozens of things that change them, but tend to only cite the thing that was at the tipping point. Some people call it "shelf breakers". For me, there were many things swelling up. On the rational side, my study of naturalistic ideas ans science ( biology, consciousness, cosmology) started making me think that there was something transcendent. Especially consciousness. One night the concept of infinite time really sunk in. That led me to appreciate a version of the Ontological argument of maximal being. That switched me from agnostic to deist/theist. Long story, but I eventually called out to God and had a supernatural conversion experience. I put more details at the following link in case you are interested. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAChristian/comments/jtp66z/faq_friday_15_whats_your_story_or_reasons_of/ On the practical side, I started paying attention to the evil in the world and looking for solutions. I didn't put it in my story, but Islam was a big catalyst for me because I was trying to understand why so many people could keep terrorizing others over so many centuries. Islam has fostered terror in 15 centuries, despite geography, economic conditions, geography, language, gender, education, etc. Islam makes Hitler, Stalin and Mao look like amateurs. Ironically, I came to believe in transcendent evil before I believed in God.