It is like there is something very profound missing and one cannot truly know what that is to make up for it. But one can know there is something, just “what?”. For me, the Church provided this connection.
Hello there.
I thank you for your thoughts, and hope you will excuse me for snipping them.
I think that there are certain needs that some folk exhibit which allow them to be fertile soil for the seeds of religious faith, and that those needs can be viewed as being the pure result of the lives which they lead, and the position within a culture they find themselves occupying.
As far as I can see into myself, I do not feel that I perceive such a need, and this is a trait which I believe that many atheists share. On the other hand, there is no question that religious folk often speak of needs which were not being met before they became religious; and I am sure anyone who, in adulthood, became more religious than they were previously, could communicate this notion.
People often speak of scientists being atheists, and wonder whether their education allows them a better vantage point in perceiving religion to be something which is they feel is untrue. Many wonder if science has ‘disproven’ the God of monotheism. From my personal experiences of scientists, and in my life as an educator of future scientists, such people who are attracted to serious study, are people who have been attracted in this way since childhood.
For them, the greatest pleasure in life is an understanding of some aspect of the natural world, say, or in understanding complex math. My best analogy is to imagine a little boy speaking ardently of dinosaurs, where they lived, what they ate, and what in the world caused them to go away. Such people, moreover, have the capacity to feel self-actualisation. Their lives have meaning in part because their great love for something has become their career, and very often, such a career is at the very least somewhat capable of supporting a comfortable lifestyle. (My sister-in-law works in medicinal chemistry, and is salaried nearly into the middle six-digit salary range. It takes a great deal of ego to accomplish something like that in life; the sort of ego that causes you to get out of bed in the morning, not narcissism. It takes ego to want good things for your family.)
How is it that such a person should feel the needs in their lives that cause them to be religious, if not tragedy? If you are a theist, this speaks well of tragedy; but to my thinking, this insinuates something more: that a life brought to its knees to worship at the altar of God, is a life which leads to yet another question which we cannot answer without first assuming a position on the existence of God. Did God permit the tragedy so that some happy person might desire to worship him? Or is the person simply religious because they ‘finally’ have a need to be? Either way, the tragedy cannot demonstrate or rule out God’s reality.
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I cant wait to here this one…
