Hello Everyone! I'm glad to be on this site.
It is the first time i am joining an atheist forum. I am writing because i need some help. Indeed, i suffer from massive cognitive dissonance. It began years ago, at this time i have always been considering myself a strong atheist but doubts arised. It is like there is a battle in my mind between the rational, scientific part (i have a master degree in physics, with a speciality in materials used in nuclear industry), and a more emotional one that wants to "believe".
Can i be couseled? It would be very nice of You and i thanking you for that.
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Moving from Site Support to Atheist Hub today.
Do you want to believe there is a diamond buried your my back yard the size of a basketball. i want to believe I am a billionaire. How is what you want to believe relevant ??????????
@talynEarth03
Welcome, I look forward to chatting with you in the future, we can always do with more sciency types around to correct my obvious lapses....Anyhoo, about your apparent 'dilemma" and errant brain....
Apply the same reasoning you do in your work to any of the gods that abound in this world.
Pray in turn to each of the Norse, Greek and Hebrew gods, pray for something like a large diamond in your backyard. If you get a diamond in your backyard repeat the experiment(prayer) to ascertain which god it was that answered you (careful with Loki he is a trickster)
Then publish your findings in a scientific paper for peer review, have the diamonds brilliant cut and send me one as a thank you.
If a diamond does not appear after two sets of entreaty, repeat the exercise with Egyptian, Hindu, Zoroastrian, and Japanese Kami.
Continue until either a diamond appears or you run out of gods.
When I was a kid I once prayed for a glass full of gold coils. Woke up the next day and had a bunch of cold boils all over my ass. I think god must be hard of hearing. Either that, or I prayed to Loki by mistake. Later on I bought a fiddle at a thrift store, but it did not have bow with it. When I got home I was gonna pray for a fiddle stick, but then thought better of it.... just in case.
@CogDiss
Hi and welcome.
I get why you want to believe. It sounds lovely doesn't it? Especially the Divine Justice part: the world's unfair and unjust, but never mind- god will sort it all out in the end. The wrongs will be righted and the good rewarded. How I wish it were true!
But it isn’t. If you want a fair, just world, the only one who can help you create it is the guy looking back at you in your mirror. Like minded friends, family and acquaintances don't hurt, either.
My suggestion to you is that when you think you have a good emotional reason to "believe" post it here and see what the reaction is.
Religions feed on emotions. That's why they tell the horror stories before passing the collection plate. Humans that are moved to emotional states make terrible decisions. (FACT)
I love Greek mythology. It is very funny. I agree with all of you. I grew up on Reunion Island where people are very religious, be it christian, hindu or muslim. What i have to precise is that i suffer from anxiety disorder and OCD so i'm pretty vulnerable on the emotional ground. My mother and father are catholic, like much the rest of the family, so religious arguments can come easily.
I did scientific studies so i lean toward metaphysical naturalism. For christianity, i have plenty of arguments against it. So i am aware that my "belief emotions" are not rational (what emotions would be??). It just that i can attack them rationally all days long, it won't disappear. Maybe i should look more closely at it, one by one and tell them apart.
Like all of those who are believers, it may be the "benovolent" figure of a powerful father that attract me... (Feuerbahc anyone??)
I gotta telly you, one of the reasons I became a Christian was for that father figure. M and F divorced when I was 6. M was abusive and I ended up running away from home at 16. It wasn't that bad... between 16 and 18 I managed to bounce around with relatives. I became a Christian at a vulnerable and low point in life for a 16 year old who no one loved. (Are your eyes watering up yet.) Well, it was traumatic for me and I found a place to belong. I belonged until I decided to become a preacher.
That is when the investigation began. I went to every Church in that small Mideastern town. I learned that the Baptists hated the evangelic. The Catholics hated the Baptists. The evangelics knew everyone but them were headed for hell. And everyone hated the Mormons and the JW. There was also a Calvinist Church that I went to and a Church of religious science. I gave up on Churches because the BS quickly became apparent.
But I was not an atheist yet. There was still Buddhism to contend with. I began studying Japanese martial arts and became enamored with Zen; Bushido, and the way of the warier. Years of reading, and education finally led me to the conclusion that all of it was BS. We really don't know.
If you get that religious emotional feeling, I would recommend J. Krishnamurti to you. Audiobook on YouTube.
See if you don't like this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOowwi8xYUA
It seems as though I might have been like you.
I was also raised Catholic.
But once I was better educated I knew evolution was sound and logical but I still felt like there was a god. A deep yearning, knowing he’s there.
In psychology you learn that through years of indoctrination (especially during development) your subconscious becomes brainwashed. So your feeling for god, is simply your inner brain telling you what it is trained to tell you.
That feeling never went away for me. Up until one day I experimented with LSD, and after the high wore off, that feeling disappeared.
I’m not saying it’s a cure, it has other side effects too and can also be dangerous.
I was just wanting a good high, not a whole new take on life. But yet I’m glad it happened.
Good luck on finding your path.
Closet!!! Haven't seen you in awhile. How ya been doin', bud?
@Tin-Man
Well I’m still kicking, surprisingly since my folks kinda know I’m atheist(big argument with my brother in law while in front of my parents) but yet no accepted validation.
Been watching a lot of human evolution documentaries, very interesting. Also provides some more arguing points that won’t be listened to.
And you? Still rusting away
Yes. I experienced that too but in the opposite direction during post grad college - battling an emerging Atheism that relentlessly pounded my evangelical christianity into dust.
When you are studying and writing about physics do you believe what you want to, or what the evidence validates? If the latter then you should question why you'd use a reliable method to validate all claims except for religious ones, where you allow emotional bias to ignore evidence or the lack of it.
You even seem to have reached this conclusion yourself in your post. So I'm not sure why you have any cognitive dissonance?
Most of us grew up heavily exposed to religion, and this brainwashing may have persisted for most of an adult's life.
In my case, reaching the intellectual conclusion that a god does not exist does not wipe away decades of programming and mental conditioning.
talynEarth03 I suggest you deal with your issues with this approach. You have arrived at the correct intellectual conclusion, but decades of brainwashing are still clouding your brain. It may take many years to cleanse yourself of all that baggage. Just hang in there, confusion and doubts are common to those throwing off the shackles of religion.