Transitions

I was once a devout christian.  I was even in the understudy for the ministry when I was in my teens.  I preached in churches which did not have a regular minister and some Sunday evenings in my own church.  But I was taken away from that for a time.  When I returned to the beliefs of my childhood, experiences cast doubt on the truthfulness of the beliefs.  Too many things just did not fit.  I eventually concluded that beliefs in gods and supernatural existence were either false or very inaccurate.  Although I didn't think that I could truthfully claim absolute knowledge that there were no gods or supernatural elements, I did conclude that all human beliefs in gods and the afterlife that I had investigated were filled with fallacies.  The best that I was able to determine was that we were physical beings in a physical universe.  I saw no intrinsic validity in theistic and supernatural beliefs.  I had to rebuild my life from a naturalistic perspective.

The abandonment of my old beliefs had difficulties.  For one thing, I was raised in a culture that associated morals with theistic commandments.  Without belief in any gods or the fear of their punishments, I had to rebuild my ethics from a physical standpoint.  This was difficult for reasons that I will explain in a separate post.  The difficulties were not because of any theistic exclusivity to morals.  On the contrary, the difficulties arose because my early conditioning about morals were tied to theistic dictates rather that physical and social realities.  Another psychological issue was the hell syndrome.  I had been indoctrinated into the belief that non-believers go to hell.  This caused substantial emotional and cognitive difficulties as I transitioned to purely physical perspectives.

One conclusion that I have made is that children should be taught ethics from social and physical perspectives.  My experiences indicate that societies will be far better off if people have common ethics based on physical, social and planetary requirements.  Some people claim bad human behavior as the proof that life does not work out correctly without spiritual beliefs.  But it seems to me that any correlation between increased unethical behaviors and the decrease in religious controls is because too much of society has left moral training as the domain of religion.