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My life without god
    #11397372 -

One of the things I like to pay attention to, in the people I meet, is how their personality is influenced by the idea of god, thinking that this aspect has a surprisingly high influence on everyone, even on those who seem to be the least preoccupied with the matter.
I was curious what everyone's experiences here on the Shroomery are regarding god, but first I'll share mine.

I was raised by a mother who has always been very religious, fanatic I might even say, up to the point of utter irrationality.
As a kid, most of my questions were answered with "that's how god made things to be", "this will only happen if god wants", as well as other variations on the same theme. Along with all these beliefs of hers came the messianic complex, doubled by a highly addictive and weak personality.
My first childhood was deeply impressed by this god image, and I remember experiencing high feelings of anxiety thinking that I was trapped in a situation where someone else was supposed to make all the decisions for me, that if I chose to do something all by myself I would be punished, and that there was always someone watching every move I made, reading all my thoughts.  :ashamed: I even remember reaching a point where I was seriously considering killing myself because I didn't see any purpose in living a life where I wasn't the one to decide how my life should be, without having some super-being breathing on my back with a big no-no on his face. Then of course, I had all those stages of trying to make something more pleasant out of god, and somewhere on this path I started questioning myself and the reasons for which I needed that change.
Eventually, I ended up believing that, besides the stories told by person X and Y about the existence of a god, there was NOTHING in the outside, objective world that could point out to the existence of a higher being that had power of decision on my life, and all of the sudden my anxieties were gone and being replaced by an incredible feeling of internal peace and bliss. To me, the thought that I really didn't owe my life to anyone else but me was the most anxiety-releasing catalysts, the one that finally allowed me to start living my life and enjoying it like there was no tomorrow. :heart:


--------------------
:bunny::bunnyhug:
All this time I've loved you
And never known your face
All this time I've missed you
And searched this human race
Here is true peace
Here my heart knows calm
Safe in your soul
Bathed in your sighs
:bunnyhug: :yinyang2:

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Re: My life without god [Re: MushroomTrip]
    #11397395 -

MushroomTrip said:
To me, the thought that I really didn't owe my life to anyone else but me was the most anxiety-releasing catalysts, the one that finally allowed me to start living my life and enjoying it like there was no tomorrow. :heart:


Yeah, and that moment of self reliance is when you sealed your lake of fire fate, way to go your prideful sinner. :sun:


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Jesus loves you.

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Re: My life without god [Re: MushroomTrip]
    #11397415 -

I was raised an atheist and I'm still an anxious egotistical prick (somtimes) and still have had messianic complex, well nearly anyway close enough. :lol:


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Little left in the way of energy; or the way of love, yet happy to entertain myself playing mental games with the rest of you freaks until the rivers run backwards. 

"Chat your fraff
Chat your fraff
Just chat your fraff
Chat your fraff"

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Re: My life without god [Re: MushroomTrip]
    #11397451 -

Lucky you that you were able to come to reasonable conclusions as a child.:thumbup:


--------------------
"Don't believe everything you think". -Anom.

" All that lives was born to die"-Anom.

With much wisdom comes much sorrow,
The more knowledge, the more grief.
Ecclesiastes circa 350 BC

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Re: My life without god [Re: Grapefruit]
    #11397459 -

Do you think you have an idea about what has influenced your messianic complex, along with all the other anxieties?
This is a very interesting subject for me, and I think that there should be done some rigorous research on how this idea of god has been influencing the psyche of humanity thought time.


--------------------
:bunny::bunnyhug:
All this time I've loved you
And never known your face
All this time I've missed you
And searched this human race
Here is true peace
Here my heart knows calm
Safe in your soul
Bathed in your sighs
:bunnyhug: :yinyang2:

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Re: My life without god [Re: Icelander]
    #11397463 -

Icelander said:
Lucky you that you were able to come to reasonable conclusions as a child.:thumbup:


Took me til I was like 20yrs old :lol:


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Jesus loves you.

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Re: My life without god [Re: andrewss]
    #11397506 -

It still takes me, and I'm 26. :shrug:

The reason why I say that it still does, is because, every now and then, I keep finding "ghost" feelings or thoughts that are still running in the back of my mind and that are sabotaging my mental peace, and on a closer look I discover how related they are to the whole god experience.
I am not complaining though, or freak out that much like I used to, because it's interesting to look at it as an opportunity to explore deeper on how the mind is structured.


--------------------
:bunny::bunnyhug:
All this time I've loved you
And never known your face
All this time I've missed you
And searched this human race
Here is true peace
Here my heart knows calm
Safe in your soul
Bathed in your sighs
:bunnyhug: :yinyang2:

Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Re: My life without god [Re: andrewss]
    #11397519 -

Raised as an atheist, now I tend to suspect that God is the culmination of the evolution of all sentient beings a la Teilhard's Omega Point.


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We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

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Re: My life without god [Re: MushroomTrip]
    #11397522 -

MushroomTrip said:
It still takes me, and I'm 26. :shrug:

The reason why I say that it still does, is because, every now and then, I keep finding "ghost" feelings or thoughts that are still running in the back of my mind and that are sabotaging my mental peace, and on a closer look I discover how related they are to the whole god experience.
I am not complaining though, or freak out that much like I used to, because it's interesting to look at it as an opportunity to explore deeper on how the mind is structured.


I hear ya.


--------------------
"Don't believe everything you think". -Anom.

" All that lives was born to die"-Anom.

With much wisdom comes much sorrow,
The more knowledge, the more grief.
Ecclesiastes circa 350 BC

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Re: My life without god [Re: deCypher]
    #11397535 -

deCypher said:
Raised as an atheist, now I tend to suspect that God is the culmination of the evolution of all sentient beings a la Teilhard's Omega Point.



We believe everything is all one because of the sublimity of being a tree and maybe some similiar state we had way back in our evolution :wink: (kinda stole that idea)



--------------------
Jesus loves you.

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Re: My life without god [Re: MushroomTrip]
    #11397543 -

It was psychedelics mixed with arrogance for me and honestly only lasted about a week of thinking I was enlightened and preaching at people so I guess it was a mild one. I remember I was a solipsist from the age of 5-10 though. I have the feeling most if not all kids are. I don't remember enough to know what caused that though possibly because I used to be abused by my dad (not sexually but quite a lot of violence) perhaps causing me to reject everyone else? I don't really know though.


--------------------
Little left in the way of energy; or the way of love, yet happy to entertain myself playing mental games with the rest of you freaks until the rivers run backwards. 

"Chat your fraff
Chat your fraff
Just chat your fraff
Chat your fraff"

Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Re: My life without god [Re: andrewss]
    #11397547 -

I believe that everything is composed of energy and in that way the same thing. Science showed me that.:lol:


--------------------
"Don't believe everything you think". -Anom.

" All that lives was born to die"-Anom.

With much wisdom comes much sorrow,
The more knowledge, the more grief.
Ecclesiastes circa 350 BC

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Re: My life without god [Re: MushroomTrip]
    #11414478 -

MushroomTrip said:
I was raised by a mother who has always been very religious, fanatic I might even say, up to the point of utter irrationality.
As a kid, most of my questions were answered with "that's how god made things to be", "this will only happen if god wants", as well as other variations on the same theme. Along with all these beliefs of hers came the messianic complex, doubled by a highly addictive and weak personality. :heart:


Sis, is that you?  :grin:

I'll say this much.  I threw away all my notions after a bad trip on mushrooms.  It changed my life forever.  Things are not always as they appear.:heart:


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Re: My life without god [Re: Mr. Mushrooms]
    #11414540 -

When kids are brainwashed at a early age the thoughts stay pretty much for life, to a lesser or greater degree. Kids minds are incapable of critical thought at the early age and will accept anything told to them.Biologically this is when they must learn quickly without the impeding barrier of critical thinking.

Edited by Jaegar (11/08/09 09:39 PM)

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Re: My life without god [Re: Jaegar]
    #11414569 -

How do you explain teenagers revolting and throwing away everything they've learned then?


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Re: My life without god [Re: Mr. Mushrooms]
    #11414603 -

I doubt thy have thrown away everything they have learned, the thoughts would still be in their subconscious. Maybe when they get older and the hormones dwindle these thoughts may resurface. But hormonal teenagers rebel against any and all ideas LOL

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Re: My life without god [Re: Jaegar]
    #11414631 -

:lol:  No doubt about that.  It always makes me wonder how hormonally driven are we.


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Re: My life without god [Re: Jaegar]
    #11414636 -

Jaegar said:
When kids are brainwashed at a early age the thoughts stay pretty much for life, to a lesser or greater degree. Kids minds are incapable of critical thought at the early age and will accept anything told to them.Biologically this is when they must learn quickly without the impeding barrier of critical thinking.


Right. It takes an amazing amount of work to alter those primary neural pathways once laid down. Then over time they become super highways and it's all over usually. Just look at me.:grin:


--------------------
"Don't believe everything you think". -Anom.

" All that lives was born to die"-Anom.

With much wisdom comes much sorrow,
The more knowledge, the more grief.
Ecclesiastes circa 350 BC

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Re: My life without god [Re: Icelander]
    #11414769 -

I always thought of you more as road-kill than highway. :stoned:


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Re: My life without god [Re: OrgoneConclusion]
    #11416253 -

I thank my mother because she never imposed any belief system on my except by telling me her values and our family's values.

I understood from an early age that there were different opinions about praising god, because different parts of my family had different denominations (catholic, and orthadox, and the anglican school I went to).

When I was young, I accepted the concept of God just because everyone seemed to take it for granted.

However what I could not understand was where people were making their claims. Once accepting the notion of God, it seemed ridiculous that this all pwoerful being would require anything of me.. because it would clearly know what I think and how I feel and that I am a good person. Religion became, to me, a matter of pleasing eachother and reminding eachother that we are after the same things in life. People went to church to convince eachother that they were good people. This was the sort of thing I began thinking around 5, when my mother married an atheist.

He and my new step siblings did not go to church or celebrate anything religious but were good people, and very smart people, who taught me about science, mathematics, and computers. My notions of god slipped away, and I stopped respecting religion and saw people not only as trying to prove something to eachother but more importantly just trying to prove something to themselves. I felt annoyed that I had been told things about god as if they were real only to find out that other people on earth have other equally valid (invalid) explinations for why we are here.

As I developed into an adolescent, my grasp on science improved, and throughout highschool I was fascinated in learning how science could explain the 'true' nature of the universe.

My interest in science led me to my interest in biology and evolution.

my interest in these led to my interest in the mind, in the brain. This could only happen when I was older, around 14/15. I heard things about chemicals in teh brain and nerve impulses and all this stuff and it sounded like a cool sort of organic computer.

I started playing with consciousness by drinking alcohol and by hypoerventilating, etc. By 16 I tried marijuana and that was a launch pad for my fascination with psychology, mental illness, and 'reality'.

This led to my interest in Logic and Philosophy, something that I only became significantly interested in by around 18 when I had started university and realised that a lot of things that I thought were just ways of seeing the world and deriving information from it, were actually considered to be philosophical concepts that people studied and argued about.

When I really started applying logic to areas of science, it showed me that dispite being the logical highground, science cannot magically become perfect with logic - logic can never prove its own premises. a lot of people who were scientific or at least, claimed to not be religious, constantly made claims about the way the world was, as if these claims were sound, by the laws of science. But these claims were merely 'better' than the religious claims.

Over the last few years I have probed the world that is available to me and it has become clear that God is as likely as he is unlikely. there trully is no way of assessing the likeliness of god.

It is obvious that depictions of god given in ancient books are bogus and have been embellished over the ages from origins that wre much less specific or grandiose.

The fact that God represents all that we do not understand about the universe is very significant because, there will always be more we don't understand, about the source of ourselves, where we are going, how we judge good and bad, etc.  BUT we will also always have an emotional connection to those questions, and someone will always demand some sort of answer to these questions in order to justify moral stances.


There is, now, a 'religion of science' that takes 'the best science' to be the truth. And this is, on principle, as illogical as many religions.

Now I have an open view on life. My psychedelic experiences have shown me so many things that baffle scientists. Namely, consciousness itself. Whether or not God is real does not really matter.. what matters is that we don't know.

What I think should be understood about God is, however, that the only way that God can expect anything of humans, and thus force people to watch their steps and evade hell, is if god in fact is not a perfect, loving being. And if god is not a perfect loving being, fuck him. It is likely that he is just using us to some evil end and it is likely that existance is meant to be, overall, difficult and painful.

So the only reasonable deduction about god is that, if he exists, and is worth honouring,
then the best way to honour him is to keep doing what we are doing, following the feelings that we feel, and doing whatever we think ought to be done.


--------------------

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