Jesus Take the Wheel
Did the Atheist Witch just say that?
November 15, 2017
Truth be told if I was writing this a year or so ago, I’d probably sound like a nasty cynical bitch. As an Atheist, many people of religion don’t realize that we have studied most religious books, we have listened with an open mind to the dogma at some point, we’re history buffs and we have made our decision from an informed choice.
Yet the more I was entrenched in the “you haven’t looked at the history” attitude, the more the emotional attachment to that thought was sucking at the core of my being. If you’ve read the first page you’d know I don’t profess to be a Richard Dawkins atheist. I see how Quantum Physics could come into play with the exchange of information on subatomic level, and I see how we’re all connected. Everything.
The more I ignored this connection and could not understand how anyone in this day and age could feasibly believe in a Supreme Being, the more my spirit suffered. It wasn’t about a Supreme Being or a Creator, but about the disconnect to others.
The strong emotions I’d espouse centered a lot around pedophilia in religion. It struck me at my core and added more the disconnect of how people could support institutions that have covered up abuses for decades, sometimes centuries.
Then there were the assumptions that one can’t be moral without a Creator to tell us what’s right or wrong. Which only infuriated my ego self because this was debunked many times in research and covered in articles like Here’s What Being Good Without God Actually Means by Huffington Post.
Even though I had and still have many devout friends of various religious flavors, and totally respected them as individuals, I didn’t respect the ritual because it went against my logical and educated brain.
And then it happened. I reached an apex of disconnect that one would call rock bottom. And the only way from there was up.
The rock bottom reason doesn’t matter, but I did spell a bit of it out in this post here. The importance is that rock bottom forces us to examine our thoughts, our paradigms, our connections, and our mortality.
Part of looking around at how I made it to the bottom, I started to examine my thoughts, the past years that brought me to this point, and the ego. In desperation for input on pulling myself up, I turned to Wayne Dyer’s audio because I had them in my iTunes, about 6 Kindle books on how to get over a break-up (thanks Amazon for the 30 day free trial), at least 3 hypnosis audios on moving forward, and a few books on manifesting happiness and/or surrendering and accepting events. Not to mention the therapy sessions with various people on Skype or in meatspace.
Wayne Dyer talks a lot of “God” and if I remember correctly he even spells it as the Abrahamic God of The Holy Bible. This was a bit of a turnoff for me, but I endured because the message could be slighted altered to fix my core belief: we are all connected to everything on this earth and in the universe.
And the more I removed my ego self, the more the hurt little girl that feared being abandoned was able to heal. But there were moments in which I thought I wanted to die inside, and I found myself *almost* wanting to revert to my childhood habits of crying, “Dear God, Please help me get through this,” but would quickly switch it to the universal connection of life. And then I’d beg the universal connection of life to take control and surrender to my path. And it was in one of those points of desperation that I had a fucking eureka moment. My paradigm is really not that different from someone who believes in a Creator. It was the atheistic version of “Jesus Take the Wheel.”
Now, if there any strong atheists still reading this blog, they’re thinking I’m a sellout. But I don’t see it that way. I see it as a bridge, even though our bridges may be very different.
If you’ve read about the brain and how we process information, it’s known that people process information differently. In fact, some people can’t get to the same places in thought as others because of they’re way they are wired. Nothing negative or positive, it’s just how it is
For example, when it comes to social justice, people who are more supportive to the ideas of fairness and equity are driven by logic and reason, not just passion, according to a University of Chicago study published in the Journal of Neuroscience. What does that mean? It means we approach morality, ethics, and choices with different backgrounds and beliefs, but we all want the same thing: connection and purpose.
I’ve realized we need bridges and communication
So instead of righteous indignation on someone’s need to believe in a Creator, or a choice to do so, I’ve realized we need bridges and communication. Because I see the Universe and how we are truly all stardust, and you may see a Creator because it gets you to the same place in although it may take a different neural network in your brain than mine.
I extend a sincere apology if I’ve ever offended anyone. Yet, I will still, and always, speak loudly about institutions that harbor corruption of any kind, regardless of their claims of morality.
So does it really boil down to “connection and purpose”? I don’t know, I’m not a rocket scientist, but I do have some decent observations here and there in life.
Once I wrote a piece about the need for ritual and how that affected my child growing up in a heathen household. There were no rituals that entailed being the star of the party with a fat envelope handed to you at a baptism, confirmation, communion, etc. And the rituals we created didn’t seem to phase the believers to even want to join us and celebrate differently. The piece was obviously written with a bit of frustration at feeling left out of the family, and now I clearly see that it was incumbent upon me to explain our rituals and what they mean.
Religion helps people connect to a commonality amongst their tribe
As for purpose, I know that even strong atheists enjoys having purpose in their life right now, knowing they’re not going anywhere or doing it for a reward later. Who does’t want to have a purpose that makes them feel good getting up and expending energy through the day. Just because the end game for one may be a reckoning with their Creator, and for another it may just be the desire to bring good into the world, or a combo of both, we still all do have purpose and feel lost when we don’t align with that paradigm.
In conclusion, I shared this piece as an outreach to believers and non-believers. If you see a piece of yourself in here and could identify with the thought of bringing down walls, please share that. Let’s all be the love we all talk about, but sometimes forget when the ego steps in to take the show.
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