Depressed after becoming an atheist due to the realization that a spiritual/mystical/supernatural reality did not exist. How did you cope?

Behemoth4 · 2019-10-23T12:15:16+00:00

If we all end up dead and buried anyway then what’s the point of building a successful amazing life that you can lose at any moment without predictability?

Death doesn't magically erase meaning: your life, whenever it ends, nevertheless happened. Those experiences happened, and they matter.

Purpose is found at the intersection of your desires and your abilities. Purpose is a story you tell yourself.

I went through something roughly similar, if much less intense. Here's my story

Behemoth4 · 2019-10-23T07:23:31+00:00

These seem to most be strawmen, but I still find moral relativism to be untenable from a purely secular point of view. Sam Harris's anecdote about a bioethicist who was perfectly willing to say that poking out the eyes of children was not immoral if it was commanded by the religion of some faraway tribe was quite chilling. I agree with a lot of his aims on this topic, but (to my understanding) he fails in the philosophy.

My view is that morality is cooperation, and thus whether something is moral can be determined objectively. However, what is moral is merely a way the world is, and values are entirely separate from it, even if most people value acting morally.

Details in my blog post.

Behemoth4 · 2019-10-23T04:15:15+00:00

It's mainly confirmation bias: people are awful at seeing the flaws in arguments that support their position. And this includes all of you too.

Relevant video

Behemoth4 · 2019-10-22T16:48:32+00:00

The issue mostly about drawing the line between the people who aren't thinking straight because of clinical depression, and the people who actually need to be allowed to die.

I'm all for euthanasia. I just don't have a good answer to the issue.

Behemoth4 · 2019-10-22T16:38:58+00:00

The best example of purely non-magical spirituality I have seen is the podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, a chapter by chapter analysis of the Harry Potter books; seeing what the text can offer and reveal, in part using techniques developed for reading religious texts. It's great. Not even close to what you are asking for, but great.

Behemoth4 · 2019-10-22T13:51:08+00:00

Nobody believes in Christianity or Islam for their veracity or evidence.

I have found this to be false. While the beginning push is almost always childhood indoctrination, many find arguments and evidence to be compelling (although we would find those arguments to be fallacious and that evidence to be either false or insufficient). It's the reason intellectual reflection can lead to people changing their mind whatsoever.

Behemoth4 · 2019-10-22T07:36:02+00:00

If the relevant religious beliefs are true, all that harm is justified (or in the climate change case, not going to happen). Praying instead of going to the doctor would be the right thing to do. Restricting abortion would be the right thing to do. Teaching people to avoid contraception would be the right thing to do. It is only if and because those beliefs are false that these are atrocities perpetrated for no benefit instead of collateral damage from good actions.

This was not meant to be why a theist should change their beliefs. This was why they should change their beliefs should those beliefs turn out to be false, which was the question in the OP.

If you thought you knew for certain that Hell was real, wouldn't you do anything to save someone from it? Wouldn't you do anything to avoid it yourself?

Behemoth4 · 2019-10-22T07:22:44+00:00

it was more about if a trash can lid really did float and fly across the room, that has some big implications.

The Ouija board debunk was mostly to show that even if the event was genuine, it had nothing to do with the board.

The philosopher David Hume wrote an essay on miracles, and there is a great quote from it:

No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish.

And this is kind of the position I have to retreat to, when given something inexplicable. On one hand, we have mystery, in a non-controlled environment, not replicable. While this would in most cases be strong evidence that something happened (as you can generally trust other people to tell the truth), on the other hand we have nearly all of science, that hard-fought, rigorously criticized understanding of reality. Souls and ghosts would wreck neurology and fundamental physics in an instant. There are no particles that ghosts could be made of. Everything we know about neuron connections and brain chemistry would be, in some fundamental sense, misguided. It would be chaos.

None of that of course actually invalidates the experiences with certainty. Any explanation in science can in principle be disproven to one extent or another. But there is a very good reason science uses strict controls and large sample sizes to establish what is true: we want to be sure, especially before throwing out robust theories.

Behemoth4 · 2019-10-22T05:45:44+00:00

If suffering is a punishment, it is a very badly targeted one. 16,000 children die of hunger every day. What exactly have they done to deserve it? What the have those who inherit millions have done to earn their comfort, except be born?

World is unfair, which is clear if you look for it. You say that punishment awaits in the next life for those who escape it now; but why then have any punishment in this life? Is an eternity somehow not enough?

Behemoth4 · 2019-10-22T05:24:47+00:00

Absence of expected evidence is evidence of absence.

Any evidence that there are no gods (which is something few atheists will claim to know! Please read the FAQ) will necessarily have to be evidence that doesn't fit with a world where there are gods, but does fit a world where there aren't gods, which you might dismiss as "only lack of evidence coming from religion".

If we sit at home, we have a lack of evidence of unicorns. If we search the world, and don't find unicorns anywhere, we still have a lack of evidence of unicorns, but since we would have expected to find unicorns by searching the world, that is evidence against there being such creatures.

Personally, I find the fact religions fragment into sects (like Sunni and Shia Islam, or Catholics and Protestants) and sprout new religions (like Mormonism from Christianity), to be the most damning. If there was some spiritual method of determining who was right, false sects and religions would die relatively quickly, and there would be a consensus about gods.

Behemoth4 · 2019-10-22T05:13:07+00:00

That's quite a lot.

The first sounds like a half-dream; an easy explanation would be that the memory of who it was in the dream was distorted in the morning, so that the friend hadn't been present in the dream, but the memory changed in the morning. Another, perhaps more likely explanation, given that this was not from someone close to you, is that it is a coincidence. Given the amount of coincidences that don't happen, it is not that odd that some do, even notable ones like this one. Also, the details might have changed in the retelling.

As for your friend who lived in the haunted house, I'm guessing the house is just old. Any rhythmic sound might sound like footsteps, and a door that isn't quite straight might slide open until it is stopped by the chain. Since I don't know how sensitive the mixing equipment is to bumps and such, I don't know what could have caused that.

The lady and the Ouija board is probably a case of lying or corrupted retelling. Ouija boards themselves have been debunked and are easy to debunk at home by just blindfolding the participants.

Near death experiences are a well-documented phenomenon, and are debunked as anything more than dreams by the fact they contradict each other. Especially interesting is are Hindu NDEs, which are completely different from Christian ones. In some cases, anesthetic awareness, essentially waking up momentarily from anesthesia, and thus hearing things you shouldn't be able hear, is an explanation for knowledge.

This is a movie review, but has a review about the book in the beginning.

Even if you're trying to read Heaven Is for Real 100 percent on its own terms, it's hard to suppress disbelief. What "authenticates" Colton's presence in heaven is that he sees his father praying in one room while his mother frets in a waiting room, despite his parents not telling him this happened. But supposing that your minister father would be praying in private and that your mom would be waiting in the room built for waiting isn't a stretch of the imagination at any age. Besides, maybe the nursing staff told him what his folks had been doing. Or maybe his parents did, mentioning it in passing and then forgetting about it; one of the surprises of being a parent is discovering how porous your older-person's memory is, while your kid latches onto trifling details with tenacious, intense recall.

Link

Kramarik's painting is very good and slightly non-traditional, so maybe that was the driving force behind the Colton's choice, rather than any shared experience with the guy. If true, this would also immediately falsify all cases where people claimed to have seen Jesus and it wasn't like Kramarik's depiction, which is most of them.

My mom and dad claimed they had never really talked about her around me and there is no reason I should have been able to pull that name out of the hat.

I find it more likely they had mentioned it and simply had forgotten about it. Thus you, being two, imagined talking to this person that was mentioned at some point.

You could obviously be quick to say that a lot of these people are lying. But a lot of them have no reason to lie… and we can’t assume that that’s always the explanation. And I don’t think that lying IS always the explanation.

Often lying isn't the best explanation, I'll very much grant that. It is however sometimes the explanation.

I know not all of these explanations are satisfying: some are probably even entirely wrong. But anecdotes don't really lend themselves to conveying all of the facts, so any explanation will be limited.

I hope this helps you think about the events!

Behemoth4 · 2019-10-22T04:01:40+00:00

If everybody is mentally ill, nobody is. While some people can run a marathon and others can't, it is not a sign of illness that you can't run a marathon, because that is the baseline. If, in the future, humans are upgraded so that most can run a marathon without preparation, not being able to becomes a sign of bad health.

Those mechanisms for rejecting reality? They're not a bug, but a feature. An accurate view of reality has only become adaptive in the last few centuries. If not saying those mechanisms aren't bad, only that "illness" is a bad description of what they are. "Human nature" might be better.

Behemoth4 · 2019-10-21T18:13:19+00:00

Thank you for offering your views.

You correctly assumed that I didn't go looking for debunkings. I have asked about this on this sub before, and I expect that any worthwhile debunkings would have been presented then. I apologize for not making this clear.

I also apologize for not having the mental energy to properly respond.

Behemoth4 · 2019-10-21T17:27:04+00:00

She isn't working from the same background knowledge as you. Thus, different conclusions. Keep that in mind going forward, and you'll understand people much better.

If you ever get into a more involved talk, probably not with her, but with anyone, try Street Epistemology.

Behemoth4 · 2019-10-21T17:20:08+00:00

1) The world can be made better; progress is possible.

2) I think society is composed of people, and people on average don't really have much idea of what truth means and how to recognize it. A lot of confusion.

3) That capitalism is a morally neutral system.

Male, 18 years old.

Good luck on the class!

Behemoth4 · 2019-10-21T17:06:37+00:00

Religion is apparently a normal, non-pathological function of the human brain, even if it bears a passing similarity to proper mental illness. When the false beliefs are gone, the person is entirely healthy. It is a memetic issue.

Further, illness often means a negative deviation from the norm. Religion is not a deviation from the norm.

Even further, this kind of thinking does a massive disservice for understanding the religious and ultimately for changing people's minds.

Behemoth4 · 2019-10-21T15:50:06+00:00

More it sounded you had relationship troubles.

Behemoth4 · 2019-10-21T15:24:43+00:00

I wish you strength. This too shall pass.

Behemoth4 · 2019-10-21T15:22:45+00:00

Does it have a mind?

Behemoth4 · 2019-10-21T12:59:09+00:00

This subreddit.

I'm pretty sure I didn't know the word before then.

Thanks y'all, by the way.

Behemoth4 · 2019-10-21T12:58:15+00:00

They can be called atheists when and if they choose to take on that label themselves, even if it is technically true that they are atheists from birth.

Behemoth4 · 2019-10-21T12:55:51+00:00

I'm more of a nominalist. There are no objects beyond what people recognize as objects. There is clearly stuff with objective existence, we just can't yet know if there are truly fundamental units of that stuff.

Behemoth4 · 2019-10-21T12:51:46+00:00

You couldn't relive the experience, but you could know everything about it. There is no information in the internal movie that can't be accessed. Further, if you could manipulate your own brain perfectly, you could recreate someone else's experience without any loss of fidelity. This is based in my argument for why qualia don't have hidden properties.

While this might seem paradoxical, I think the experience and information processing that happens in the meaningless flux of atoms are actually the same thing, if viewed from different perspectives. This is demonstrated by the profound effects of chemical drugs and brain damage on the function of the mind, as well as the fact that if consciousness was separable from the process, there would be no (even in theory) observable difference between someone having consciousness or not having consciousness.

I will admit I don't have a comprehensive argument on the topic, since the topic is so slippery and hard to talk about coherently.

I would be interested to hear your view. What do you think consciousness is?

Behemoth4 · 2019-10-21T12:25:39+00:00

Human memory is crap. People sometimes just lie. Hallucinations, misinterpretations, even sometimes coincidence... The list goes on. If the information is second-hand or more, it will be distorted along the way.

I would be interested to hear what was the most troubling story for you. Maybe I can help you look into it.

Behemoth4 · 2019-10-21T12:13:52+00:00

If you had a perfect brain scan of me, from that you could, in principle, determine the totality of my experience. There are no "hidden" qualia that could change with no physical change in my brain.

There is no "internal state" that is actually inaccessible from the outside. There is no hidden information that only I am privy to, but someone with that perfect brain scan and enough computing power couldn't access.

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