For most of my life, I have rejected the belief of God. During the time of my bar-mitzvah, I began doubting the existence of god and religion. About two years down the road, I became a full out atheist (and have been one for a decent while now).

While I do find science fascinating, I always wish that I could somehow believe in God again, or believe in something. Becoming an atheist has made me some what depressed and jaded. The harder I try though to again become religious, the more unbelievable and ridiculous religion seems.

Here is my question to you.. do any of you wish that you could believe again, erase all the knowledge you know and honestly think that both God and heaven exist (Due to hell not being part in Judaism, I'm not sure where this would fit in with many Christians).

So our belief timeline is basically the same, i.e. i did my barmitzvah, took in my presents, continue to go to synagogue for 1 year just to please my parents and then completely stopped.

You dont know how often ive wished i could believe in something. Ill just be sitting in bed, when my wife is out of town and im all alone just wishing that i could believe in this stuff.

I wonder how comforting it must be to be so certain (about what i believe is wrong) that it allows you to live carefree.

I do envy those who believe, cause i will never be one of them.

In

The nih-nominee thread

on the RGT Forum Aaron W. gives the most intellegent development I've seen on 2+2 of assumptions people make in their Worldview and their implications. It starts at post 150 and continues to post 182. It's a difficult concept but I think well worth serious consideration. In post 182 he addresses your issue, in context of his previous discussion.


From Post 182
PairTheBoard

This post fits better in RGT. You will receive a full spectrum of responses; from the absurd to the sublime. Make your own decision as to which is which.

I'm both comfortable and at a peace with my secular worldview (atheist/scientific materialist)

Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.

Prince Gautama Siddharta, the founder of Buddhism, 563-483 B.C

-Zeno

I grew up Christian, and I really have no interest in believing in God. He gives you free will, but if you don't do as God wishes, straight to hell with you. The idea of being a slave to some almighty being doesn't really appeal to me.

While a blissful afterlife sounds nice, I don't see why believing in it would make me any happier in my earthly existence. In fact, I would say most theists in the back of their mind don't really believe in heaven. If they truely believed, then why is everyone always sad at funerals? Instead of a somber funeral, you should be having a kick ass party to celebrate the fact that your loved one finally made it to heaven.

If I knew that my life would be happier due to believing and there was a button I could press that made me religious then I definitely press the button. But, my non-belief in God doesn't worry me and I have no desire to believe.

He had me at "do not believe in anything."

I would probably feel better if I believed in a loving God. But belief in a cruel God is something I am glad to be done with.

You can't possibly believe anything under this framework. Or, very little. I take it to be the case that every idea you hold is not because of some rigorous analysis and observation done by yourself. At some point you have to trust others are not deceiving you and to believe what they are reporting through some kind of analysis--how much you find them credible, truthful, etc. Perhaps I missed the point.

Not believing anything is believing something though, isn't it?

Well if you are serious OP you might want to read The Language of God by Francis Collins. He's the only scientific atheist I can think of who switched to theism from atheism and wrote this book on it. He goes over a lot of the gaps between science and religion as well as a short overview of theistic evolution.

Here's an excerpt from Collins' The Language of God:

What Kind of Faith?

In the opening chapter of this book, I described my own pathway from atheism to belief. I now owe you a deeper explanation of my subsequent path. I offer this with some trepidation, since strong passions tend to be incited as soon as one begins to differentiate from a general sense of God's existence to a specific set of beliefs.

Most of the world's great faiths share many truths, and probably they would not have survived had that not been so. Yet there are also interesting and important differences, and each person needs to seek out his own particular path to the truth.

After my conversion to belief in God, I spent considerable time trying to discern his characteristics. I concluded that He must be a God who cares about persons, or the argument about the Moral Law would not make much sense. So deism wouldn't do for me. I also concluded that God must be holy and righteous, since the Moral Law calls me in that direction. But this still seemed awfully abstract. Just because God is good and loves his creation does not, for instance, require that we have the ability to communicate with Him, or to have some sort of relationship with Him. I found an increasing sense of longing for that, however, and I began to realize that this is what prayer is all about. Prayer is not, as some seem to suggest, an opportunity to manipulate God into doing what you want Him to. Prayer is instead our way of seeking fellowship with God, learning about him, and attempting to perceive His perspective on the many issues around us that cause us puzzlement, wonder or distress.

Yet I found it difficult to build that bridge toward God. The more I learned about Him, the more his purity and holiness seemed unapproachable, and the darker my own thoughts and actions seemed to be in that bright light.

I began to be increasingly aware of my own inability to do the right thing, even for a day. I could generate lots of excuses, but when I was really honest with myself, pride, apathy, and anger were regularly winning my internal battles. I had never really thought of applying the word "sinner" to myself before, but now it was painfully obvious that this old-fashioned word, one from which I had previously recoiled because it seemed coarse and judgmental, fit quite accurately.

I sought to engineer a cure by spending more time in self-examination and prayer. But those efforts proved largely dry and unrewarding, failing to carry me across the widening gap between my awareness of my imperfect nature and God's perfection.

Into this deeping gloom came the person of Jesus Christ. During my boyhood years sitting in the choir loft of a Christian church, I really had no idea who Christ was. I thought of him as a myth, a fairy tale, a superhero in a "just so" bedtime story. But as I read the actual account of His life for the first time in the four gospels, the eyewitness nature of the narratives and the enormity of Christ's claims and their consequences gradually began to sink in. Here was a man who not only claimed to know God, He claimed to be God. No other figure I could find in any other faith made such an outrageous claim. He also claimed to be able to forgive sins, which seemed both exciting and utterly shocking. He was humble and loving. He spoke remarkable words of wisdom, and yet He was put to death on the cross by those who feared Him. He was a man so He knew the human condition I was finding so burdensome, and yet He promised to relieve that burden. "Come unto me all ye that are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest." (Matthew 11:28).

The other scandalous thing that the New Testament eyewitnesses said about Him, and that Christians seemed to take as a central tenet of their faith, is that this good man rose from the dead. For a scientific mind, this was difficult stuff. But on the other hand, if Christ really was the Son of God, as He explicitly claimed, then surely of all those who had ever walked the earth, He could suspend the laws of nature if He needed to do so to achieve a more important purpose.

But his resurrection had to be more than a demonstration of magical powers. What was the real point of it? Christians have puzzled over this question for two millenia. After much searching, I could find no single answer - instead, there were several interlocking answers, all pointing to the idea of a bridge between our sinful selves and a holy God. Some commentators focus on the idea of substitution - Christ dying in the place of all of us who deserve God's judgment for our wrongdoings. Others call it redemption - Christ paid the ultimate price to free us from the bondage of sin, so that we could find God and rest in the confidence that He no longer judges us by our actions, but sees us as having been washed clean. Christians call this salvation by grace. But for me, the crucifixion and resurrection also provided something else. My desire to draw close to God was blocked by my own pride and sinfulness, which in turn was an inevitable consequence of my own selfish desire to be in control. Faithfulness to God required a kind of death of self-will, in order to be reborn as a new creation.

How could I achieve such a thing? As had happened so many times with previous dilemmas, the words of C.S. Lewis captured the answer precisely:

"But supposing God became a man - suppose our human nature which can suffer and die was amalgamated with God's nature in one person - then that person could help us. He could surrender His will, and suffer and die, because He was man, and He could do it perfectly because He was God. You and I can go through this process only if God does it in us; but God can do it only if He becomes man. Our attempts at this dying will succeed only if we men share in God's dying, just as our thinking can succeed only because it is a drop out of the ocean of His intelligence: but we cannot share God's dying unless God dies; and He cannot die except by being a man. That is the sense in which He pays our debt, and suffers for us what He himself need not suffer at all." (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity)

Before I became a believer in God, this kind of logic seemed like utter nonsense. Now the crucifixion and resurrection emerged as the compelling solution to the gap that yawned between God and myself, a gap that could now be bridged by the person of Jesus Christ.

So I became convinced that God's arrival on earth in the person of Jesus Christ could serve a divine purpose. But did this mesh with history? The scientist in me refused to go any further along this path to Christian belief, no matter how appealing, if the biblical writings about Christ turned out to be a myth or, worse yet, a hoax. But the more I read of biblical and non-biblical accounts of events in first-century Palestine, the more amazed I was at the historical evidence for the existence of Jesus Christ. First of all, the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were put down just a few decades after Christ's death. Their style and content suggests strongly that they are intended to be the record of eyewitnesses (Matthew and John were among the twelve apostles). Concerns about errors creeping in by successive copying or bad translation have been mostly laid to rest by discovery of very early manuscripts. Thus, the evidence for authenticity of the four gospels turns out to be quite strong. Furthermore, non-Christian historians of the first century such as Josephus bear witness to a Jewish prophet who was crucified by Pontius Pilate around 33 A.D. Many more examples of evidence for the historical nature of Christ's existence have been collected in many excellent books, to which the interested reader is referred (L. Strobel, The Case for Christ; C. L. Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels; G. R. Habermas; The Historical Jesus: Ancient Evidence for the Life of Christ). In fact, one scholar has written, "The historicity of Christ is as axiomatic for an unbiased historian as the historicity of Julius Casesar." (Axiomatic quote from F. F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents, Are They Reliable?)

And here's a thoughtful review of the book which someone linked to in another thread:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/...age_ignorance/

If the OP wants to block Collins by superimposing Harris' agenda and opinions thats up to him.

But he seemed to indicate he wants to explore things further.

I mentioned Collins because he's somebody who seriously did do the faith search from a scientific/atheist perspective.

Everyone learns from everyone else in a free thinking society. Everyone has the personal right to weigh his own evidence and to take the bits and pieces he wants to build his own personal worldview.

So just how free thinking is it to superimpose Harris's opinion to block Collins?

What you're proposing is like going to criminal law court and only the prosecution gets to present its side.

It is not uncommon for 13, 14, 15, year olds to start thinking about the world and become depressed by all the bad things they suddenly see in it.

I don't want to dismiss your own diagnosis of yourself, but I would just like to suggest that depression can strike anyone (religious de-convert, or otherwise), and it might help if you found someone with a similar background who is older than yourself and has already been through what you're going through to talk to. (Note: I am not implying that you are still a teenager; you may be, but this advice still holds if you are older).

Emotionally, for people who aren't extreme outliers from the norm, life gets easier as you get further along into adulthood. The highs may get lower, but the lows also get higher -- so it is less of a roller coaster ride, and you are more able to ponder the dark and bad things of life without it causing you to wallow in a state of emotional despair because of it.

Edit: To answer your question- well, first, to translate your question: do you sometimes wish that everything was good and happy and had a nice ending and there was no pain and sadness and death? The answer is yes, but not in a long, long time. I consider that a rather adolescent wish. Being a responsible, productive, healthy adult means not focusing on impossible fantasies, and instead facing reality.

No, it's called being fair and balanced. I didn't tell him not to read Collins' book.

No, that's what you're proposing. I'm saying the exact opposite.

Sorry for the wrong assumption.

He can do both.

The human psyche is an extremely complicated area. Its best to ask a professional.

Personally I like C. Robert Cloninger's approach to well being but that doesn't mean it will work for the OP. He does have his own site if the OP is curious:
http://www.anthropediafoundation.org...?pagename=home

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._Robert_Cloninger

I don't know if Cloninger's methods will work for the OP but its an option.

No, the immoral baggage that comes with that construction is not the level I want to exist at, but I don't think that's the aspect you're pointing to.

You're asking something like - do I want to go back to the time I didn't know my gf was cheating on me and stealing my money because things seemed so much rosier then. Again, no and for related reasons. Wanting to live a lie attracts very few people. ( In my own case, things seem so much rosier philosophically now rather than the limited and constricted views I had then but that may not apply to most)

The past me was a different person so it's a category error to think in terms of "you can be the person you were" ... no "you" can't.

I don't believe it is.

I used to think Harris would give Craig some trouble in a debate. After reading this garbage I think Craig has nothing to worry about.

Its amusing that Harris' big moment was seeing how pretty nature was and... the frozen waterfall.

It really is a non-sequitor. This is why its difficult to dissuade the believers who chose to believe. The kind who see God everywhere. Its difficult to debate against people who draw completely irrational conclusions.

"Frozen waterful.... there must be a Jesus." I'm not surprised that one particular poster on this forum constantly references this guy. But I can't see how your average reader wouldn't just laugh at this guys thought process.

You can believe much under this framework and yes you did miss the point. To some extent in our very scientific and specialized world, there is an acceptance from specialists of what they know, but underlying all is a basic framework of reason and critical thinking skills and scientific analysis of evidence that is open to all to make reasoned judgments as to the probability of facts and knowledge, and what to believe and what not to believe and what is probable and what is not probable and what is highly improbable or what is impossible.

-Zeno

That's definitely the sort of stuff you'll see from Harris. Harris is usually just preaching to the choir.

as usual, NR convinces everyone exactly why its garbage with his thoughtful and insightful critiques....

oh wait... just another brief empty insult to Harris with no content. I, for one, am shocked.

No. That statement is fundamentally flawed.

I dare him to debate Craig. I dare Dawkins. I dare Dennett. I dare Stenger. I dare Hitchens - oh, wait a minute, he tried ahahahahahahahahaha.