Atheist tag.

I got tagged to do an interesting post.

1. Can You Remember The Day That You Officially Became An Atheist?

No. I'm pretty sure I was born one. I always viewed religion as a curiosity, sort of like bugs.

2.Do you remember the day you officially became an agnostic?

Yes. I started having, rather than the persistent deja vu that plagued my young adulthood, increasingly frequent prophetic dreams. It was kind of spooky.

It goes like this. I dream something very vivid, or get an image while meditating (which I do purely for relaxation purposes), and write it down.

And then later, sometimes that day, sometimes a few days, sometimes months later, the thing I had by then completely forgotten about happens. Initially I always think it's the usual deja vu.

So whenever this happens, I think, huh? That can't be true! So I go back and check my notes.

But it has happened enough times that I started to wonder. And I've had similar experiences with things like Tarot cards predicting that certain types of people would come into my life, and in every case they were very unusual phenotypes, not the sort of thing that could easily be ascribed to random chance.

Do some people have special powers, a third eye, something like that? Am I one of them? I don't know. If I am, I haven't figured out how to use my powers to my own advantage!

So it's totally crazy, and I think I'm pretty objective about it, but it does make me wonder if there isn't some kind of order to the universe.

And I always liked the Gaia hypothesis (learned about it in high school biology class).

I do like the idea that there is some kind of balance. But I don't depend on it. Whenever I catch myself thinking "everything happens for a reason", I have to be honest, it's only when my life is going well. When it's not, I have to admit a lot of shit happens for no good reason whatsoever. Shit just happens.

But hey, plenty of people in my life in need of karmic payback. I would love to believe it was coming, good and bad, that we all get what we deserve even if nobody gets what they want.

3. How about the last time you spoke or prayed to God with actual thought that someone was listening?

Never.

4. Did anger towards God or religion help cause you to be an atheist or agnostic?

Nope. I don't think so. But I do think I was looking at the evidence as, I can't believe in an angry or vindictive deity, and I can't believe that an all-powerful being (such as a deity would have to be?) would create or abide by a world such as this. I think from a young age I concluded that, the world being what it is, if there ever was a God, it's dead now.

5. Were you agnostic towards ghosts, even after you became an atheist?

I don't know. So I guess the answer is yes. I've never seen a ghost, but I've met lots of people who have. I've had dreams of people who died, but I never ascribed those to anything other than my own desire to see them again. But that's not to say that I might not see a ghost myself someday. I guess I try to be open-minded, more and more in my old age I've seen things that have made me think that's the only way to be. I'm closed-minded only toward closed-minded people!

6. Do you want to be wrong?

Ever? Or do you mean about religion?

In general, yes I do often go the pessimistic route but hope that I'm wrong.

But on the religion thing, no, unless it really is true that there was an all-loving, all-fixing God who was, I don't know, gone on vacation to another galaxy (in a UFO) and bound to reappear and say, "Oh shit! What happened here? I can't leave you alone for one minute!" And everything would magically improve?

Somehow I doubt it.

I've recently discovered the Eastern religions that believe God is in everyone, and that makes more sense to me. A more humanistic good.

I think all we can do is try to fumble our way through life, and I think for some people religion is like a security blanket. Something to hold onto when everything is scary and we all feel lost and hopeless.

I also think science is a bit of a religion, in the sense that you have to put your faith in our ability, as philosophers and experimentalists, to learn something about life through the methods we have devised. I'm really a relativist at heart, I think we do the we best we can, but a lot of it will turn out to be not quite right in the long run, and that's okay.

But it doesn't mean we should stop trying, does it?

Some days I wonder if my general inability to have faith, to feel faith and execute the program [.\Faith], will eventually extend my general disillusionment to encompass all of science. I guess when that happens, I'll have to quit doing it. Lately my fear is that, if my main inspiration was to help people, and I have lost faith that anything I do will help anyone, doesn't that mean I should choose some other way to improve the world?

I'm also an existentialist, always have been. I think it's most likely that you get one shot, and when it's over it's over, just unconsciousness and the great big black. So I've always had that same sense of urgency that Dr.Jekyll&Mrs.Hyde mentions, what I think of as the "This is it" drive.

Which is probably where my perpetual frustration and impatience stems from. If I thought I had all the time in the world, that would be one thing. I have only this time, this life. So I do what I can.

I tag FSP, Unbalanced Reaction, and Geeka. If you're reading. And it's okay if you don't want to do it, I don't really believe in tag.