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Mightfo
@Mightfo
sapphire
@sapphire asked:

i feel like some people see atheism as like. an easy out from the normative position of being in a religion, but in my experience, the lack of a grand narrative like that can honestly be kind of challenging to make peace with. if it's not too personal of a question, do you struggle with anything like this at all?

That's a very interesting question and a very understandable thing to have trouble with. While I've thought about this a fair amount, I've never really emotionally struggled with it for reasons I can't really explain(i think partially due to some rigid aspects of my personality when i was young), but I think the core is that fundamental empathy is enough of a root.

Through one's own feelings, selfish desires, and wanderings through sentience, one can extrapolate from placing value on one's own joys and pains and peculiar experiences to feeling the weight of this happening with everyone else.

What higher thing is there than the living experiences of billions? Even if a god's decrees and divine origin stories were real, would those things really be greater?

I personally don't limit that notion to humans either.

There are a couple similar quotes that I think are also relevant, by Sagan and Brian Cox:
“Human beings are a way for nature to understand itself.”
“We are the cosmos made conscious and life is the means by which the universe understands itself.”

Physical senses, societal structures, the accumulation of knowledge, etc- these things are outgrowths of fundamental properties that beings have to grapple with. The difficulty of knowing let alone even perceiving, scarcity, mutability, the vastness between things, things like these inform the shape of life and struggles and complexity.

In this context, beings are like tendrils of the earth, stretching out and growing and trying to grasp more and more, developing things like eyes and language and imagery and organization and digitality, which gradually bridge various fundamental gaps that surround existence. Scarcity that makes us fear and suffer, the default imperceptibility of the universe that makes everything seem like chaos and unknowingness until you have countless years of evolution and society built up, the confusing gaps between different beings' hearts(whether as simple gaps between selves, or structural gaps between groups), etc. The mindless single-celled pursuit of survival becomes the pursuit of bonds and knowledge, especially as empathy and rationality gradually form strengths that opposing behaviors cannot replicate.

We sit on a tiny, messy part of the history of earth's attempt to feel and make sense of anything. The centering of peoples' experiences, and thus of empathy, reflects that history, that fundamental struggle to navigate existence by beings, to reject the cruel chaos and imperceptibility that existence began with.

And as far as moral imperative fits into the purpose of religious narrative, I feel like the only thing I need is knowing this: Humans only have themselves to help each other. Without gods, our actions matter all the more.

I dont know if this is really what you were looking for, but that's what came to mind. That may've been a bit of a ramble, but it would take me a lot more time to be more structured about this, so I hope that's valuable for now at least. I would also like to add more about small-level acceptance of things, but that's very complicated and the thoughts arent flowing right now. If other atheists have interesting answers(perhaps if you ask some others?), I'd be interested in those as well.


TrainsgenderFoxgirl2816
@TrainsgenderFoxgirl2816
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