dynasty:
An honest reply deserves an honest reply.
I was once roughly in your position; believing that there's got to be something out there guiding everything. In my case I would point to my freakishly good luck in life, stumbling from good job to better job, etc without much effort at all spent trying to find and secure it. Since my conversion to godless heathenism it's continued to happen. Personally I figure it's half optimism ("better job" being entirely my definition) and half recognizing opportunities when they present themselves, no divine fate necessary.
That's not how I lost my faith though.
Childhood indoctrination is a difficult thing to shake. What did it for me is I read the Bible. Try it sometime. The god of the Bible is not a good god, no matter how often his followers tell him he is. You're probably not familiar with most of the Bible (very few people are), except the good bits they talk about in church. Even then, well, consider Abraham and Isaac. Long story short, god orders this guy to murder his only son in cold blood for no other reason than to see if he'd actually do it. Like some jackass frat boy hazing recruits just to see what they'll put up with.
That's not a god worthy of worship.
So I tried talking about it with fellow Christians. Hoo boy. If you're not the kind to be satisfied with a shrug and "mysterious ways, man, mysterious ways," you will get very little other than grief from that lot. Apparently Christians are never allowed to actually hold god accountable for the crap he does, only make excuses on his behalf when he does it. The most helpful feedback I received was a woman who told me that not only was I not a Christian to be asking such questions, I had probably never been a Christian to begin with.
That's how I lost my faith. Because I realized she was probably right.
Being a true Christian - not the dictionary definition, but the Christian which Christians exhort themselves to emulate - requires real faith. The belief in a thing not only with nothing to support it but, I realized then, in spite of any and all good arguments against it. The very act of questioning faith is proof you don't have it, if you ever did. Or as I'd put it now, once you finally see a lick of god damned sense, all the nonsense you'd believed in before turns out to be nonsense. And unless you're the kind of person who can look at nonsense and honestly convince yourself that there must at least a little sense in there
somewhere, you're eventually going to write the whole thing off as the nonsense it is.
In the case of the Bible, as a tribal mythic history appropriated by a charismatic cult leader whose ideas somehow caught on. Like a first century David Koresh. Read as that, and not as a book of commands from a beard in the sky, it makes a whole lot more sense.
Sociologically speaking, there's a couple of ways to go from that point. I could have taken a spin on Pascal's Roulette, and become a devoted follower of Buddhism, or Onanism, or the Temple of the Left-Handed Pyramid, or some such religion filled with empty pleasantries. Many people do, if only to score with the college sophomores who're there as a show of rebellion from their parents. But I had too much self-respect to choose a creed just because it sounded nice.
Like I mentioned earlier I also could have, and did, stew in ietsism for a while. Only I stopped going to church because I disliked many of the people there with me, disagreed with most of what they said and disbelieved entirely in whom they said it in the name of.
Eventually I realized I was just hanging on to my agnostic theism because I hadn't had the balls to contemplate the effect that coming out of the closet, so to speak, would have on my world view. So I got good and drunk one night, did some soul searching and ended up unexpectedly unsurprised when I failed to find one. Turns out there's not all that much different between believing in a god with no particular properties, desires or promises and not believing in any god at all. Only you end up with a greater personal integrity and, ironically, peace of mind.
dynasty said:
So I'm doing meth, every day, all day, for 4 yrs. And then one day i woke up and quit. No withdrawals, no side effects, just stop cold. So either meth is in no way addictive, and has no side effects. or for some reason someone wanted me to stop, because i sure as hell didn't want to stop.
This one I can answer. You got lucky.
Society likes to portray addiction as this homogeneous thing that sets its fangs in you and never lets go. But read the medical research, it's much more complicated than that. All dependency works by altering dopamine pathways, but there's a lot of variance in individuals and their drugs. Sometimes people can quit morphine cold turkey. Sometimes they get hopelessly addicted to
World of Warcraft. Sometimes it's the same person. A great deal of research money goes to figuring out why someone takes the first path instead of the second, and how that knowledge might help people who aren't as lucky as you.
All the same, I wouldn't push your luck. Dependency gets worse the second time.
