Posted: Apr 01, 2016 12:29 pm
blue triangle wrote:
As I stated, believing is seeing. You don't don't believe I was ever an atheist, so you don't see what's in front of your eyes. You'd rather believe this is some huge wind-up, or me trying to take the metaphysical high ground. Thomas, I was an atheist from the age of 11, when I had a little epiphany at Sunday school, when they tried to tell me that Methuselah lived for 969 years, until a vision I received at the age of 38. That's 27 years of atheism. I was an agnostic atheist at points; but most of the time I was a fairly convinced atheist. I hesitate to say gnostic atheist, but very, very close to it. The issue was settled for me by my early thirties - life's a bitch and then you die - and I accepted it.
That's some worthwhile detail, BT, but the details about your circumstances when you had your 'vision' are missing, and even if you gave them, I'd take them with a few grains of salt. You'd have to tell us how many years beyond your epiphanic vision at 38 you've been at this, but I think that's an unfair request for personal detail that no one here would be obliged to respond to.
So your circumstances are going to have to remain in the realm of anecdote. It's not that I don't believe that you had some sort of epiphanic vision, but I don't accept that such events are supernaturally delivered. I accept that people just get too stressed out and capitulate to anxiety, sometimes in the way you claim to have done.
It doesn't bother me that life's a bitch, and then you die. It's pretty horrible what happens to a lot of people when age catches up with them, in their 50s of sudden heart attacks (not a bad way to go, if you have to go early) or in their late 80s with COPD. Yet others victimized by no other than genetics are early victims of diabetes.
What's scary about living is all the ways things can go wrong. Somebody gets a mole on her back that she doesn't know about and suddenly her body is riddled with metastasis. That's how Eva Cassidy went, far too young.
It doesn't matter, BT. You have to keep the "life is short" part well in mind. Whatever goes wrong won't last long, although it might seem it at the time. If you don't have that kind of self-possession naturally, building a theistic house of cards is only going to be a plaster over the irritation. There are meds for anxiety that actually change the way your endocrine system functions.