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What have you changed your mind about?
(lemm.ee)
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this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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When I was in my late teens up to around 20 I still believed in God and religion. Looking back, largely to please my Mum.
My views changed because my brother was so dismissive about religion so I started to question it myself properly for the first time. I'd taken it for granted after being indoctrinated into Catholicism my whole life.
Once I started questioning and actually thinking about religion (rather than just accepting it as the dull background to my life) I moved fairly rapidly to become an atheist. I've never once doubted or regretted that change. I feel like it was a turning point in my life when I actually started looking around me and questioning everything, and developing as my own person.
I'm proud of you for taking that step! It seems like few people stop to actually question their beliefs and grow from learning something new.
I grew up believing, never really thought about it. Then, in my teens, I started thinking for myself and the cracks started appearing, and I was a pretty staunch atheist for some time. Very big on pure logic and rationality.
Later on, I started thinking for myself again, and started recontextualizing a lot of the descriptions of "God" that were common across beliefs, rather than sectarian fundamentalist pulpit bluster. I was reading Spinoza and I thought of what the burning bush said to Moses, "I am that 'I am'", and something just clicked.
I definitely haven't gone back to my childhood faith, but atheism is certainly something I changed my mind about. A cosmic consciousness just makes too much sense, rationality speaking, when you try to consider what consciousness is, how it originates. Either it's purely emergent from complex organized matter, in which case the even more complex organized universe could obviously have it's own larger emergent consciousness, or it's a universal force that merely concentrates in complex organized matter. Any other explanation is far too arbitrary to survive Occam's razor.