50 proofs that god is imaginary

It is easy to prove to yourself that God is imaginary. The evidence is all around you. Here are 50 simple proofs:

The folly of prayer

**Whenever there's a high-profile tragedy, especially if it involves kids and guns, there are two voices that rise to the top of the clamor. The gun advocates. The prayer advocates. Many of my friends and family are in the latter category so I'm reticent to be more public with my opinions about that silly and useless practice. But here, in the safe confines of blogscurity, I can rant all I want and only those die-hards may know.

I practiced prayer for over 35 years. Not just prayed but advocated it, taught it, explained it, actually believed it myself. True, my brand of prayer was the Christian Science variety, which has a veneer of intellectuality about it. "Scientific prayer" was seen as not an appeal directly to a deity but as a way to neutralize "erroneous beliefs" in the minds of those who are experiencing or witnessing bad things. The underlying assumption is that everything in existence is in good harmony everywhere and that disharmony is the perceptual result of conclusions that assume the possibility of disharmony. The standard scapegoat is "matter," or that which the senses perceive. In other words, the physical world – the constituents of everything from the sub-atomic to the astronomical realms. Furthermore, these illusory items are considered to be only the phantasmagoric projections of something called "mortal mind," or a mental state so limited that the possibility of evil, or "error," can seem to exist. In other words, you'd see everything as perfectly good and happy if it weren't for your mental state, which you inherited from the false beliefs that your parents gave you by causing you to be conceived and born in the first place. A loser from the beginning, you have no hope except through the use of "scientific prayer." Such prayer, by focusing on the concepts of goodness, benevolence and perfection that refer to the "real" spiritual world you can break the spell of illusion that makes you believe that somebody shot a lot of kids in an elementary school. You will not only feel better, but the effect of this "prayer" can ripple out and help sway the receptive minds of everyone so that they will in turn believe in evil less and feel better and – eventually in some vague future – all false belief will be corrected and the world will appear in its naturally perfect state. Which, by the way, is also the definition of heaven.

Yes, it's convoluted and tautological and unverifiable –in other words, not really as "scientific" as it claims to be. But because it comes dressed in intellectuality, it is believed in by those who consider the kind of prayer everyone else practices to be plebeian . Also, because it lets the pray-er feel better and often has a placebo effect. Countless "testimonies" of "healing" are based on this gut feeling that because the pray-er did the right thing by thinking the right thought then a bad situation was "healed." Oh, and if an individual victim of evil isn't spiritual enough to do it for themselves, they can hire someone else, a "practitioner," to do it for them and in some way nudge their mentality in the right direction. That's what I used to do, and teach, and preach about. And which for the past ten or so years have come to know is pure bullshit.

This doesn't mitigate the folly of prayer as the hoi polloi views it. Theirs is a much simpler, and probably more natural response to evil. It's based on the power structure in families. Kids learn that there are people out there who have the power to do them good or do them harm. Parents, at first. It's natural for a kid to run to a parent for comfort and healing when bad things happen, and that's because parents usually feel compassion and obligation to take care of their kids. As adults, many still cling to the habit, but instead of their too obviously fallible and undependable parents (and other adults) they run to a Super Parent figure, the conventional "God." But it's still folly. When people call for prayer at times of ghastly tragedy, like Sandy Hook, what are they actually expecting? That their divine friend will suddenly change the situation so that it didn't really happen (a la Christian Science)? Probably not. That their Big Friend will stop what It's doing and run over to the "souls" of the kids killed and make them feel better (assuming they exist in a state where they still have conscious feelings) or save them from Big Friend's nemesis, the Devil)? Probably some do. That their Big Friend, who didn't or couldn't stop the tragedy in the first place will now rush into the feelings of everyone else grieved by the event and make them feel better? Probably many.

Folly. All folly.

Instead of going into a dreamy state of wishing, people should get off their knees and do something practical. Like raise hell with legislators and stop the gun lobby's warping of the 2nd amendment to allow practically untrammeled commerce in the sale of weapons (we don't need citizens with assault rifles protecting us against a government with drones and cluster bombs and all sorts of mayhem-producing products from that same industry.) An interesting story surfaced recently where a madman in China broke into an elementary school and wounded a number of children with a knife. Guns are illegal in China. And the kids were WOUNDED and will recover. Not quickly KILLED en masse by a nut with guns made available by a warping of the 2nd amendment by a huge industry that profits from the mass marketing of weapons.

So, stop with the pious folly and realize we don’t live in a perfect world and probably never will. DO stuff, not just believe stuff.

As the crab moves…

**My friend Bernard's year-end letter differs from the usual. It contains a cogent analysis of what has just happened in the US, and the prospects for the future. He notes that progress in America moves in a crab-like direction. At last it is moving in the direction I prefer. (Used with permission)

"The Coming Dominance of the Democratic Party and What Will Eventually Undo It

With the re-election of President Obama in 2012, the trends in American politics that give a near-term advantage to the Democratic Party have been thrown into sharp relief. The increasing ethnicity and urbanism of the American electorate, most obvious in the rising tide of Millennial-generation voters, has given an edge to the Democratic Party. Its identification with tolerance and communal spirit have increasing resonance for an electorate that grows more socially liberal and more relaxed about the role of government with every year’s deaths among older voters and increases in the number of newly eligible younger voters.

The Republican Party, meanwhile, has fallen victim to its own very successful political strategy of the last decades of the twentieth century. President Johnson famously remarked when he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1965 that he had lost the South to the Re- publicans for a generation. Insightful as the remark was, he underestimated the effect, as the Republican Party went on to become dominant in the South at virtually all levels of government for forty years, undoing the post-Civil War dominance the Democrats had enjoyed in the region for the previous hundred years.

In the course of that transformation, the Republican Party increasingly embraced the culture and values of the South as its base. It became more intolerant, less socially liberal, and more mistrustful of government than it had ever been when it was dominated by old- line country club Republicans, whose primary values were prosperity and freedom, especially for American business.

Through the last decades of the twentieth century, the Republican message was able to unite various kinds of conservatives in winning coalitions. A muscular foreign policy was agreeable to all but the most isolationist tendencies. A belief that low taxes were critical to economic success helped unite the ideas of freedom and economic self-interest in a way that made it comfortable for Republicans to believe that Democrats were actually disadvantaging those at the low end of the economic ladder they purported to champion. And patriotism, evidenced in a messianic mission to transform the world into democracies, provided more glue to bind the groups together and to pry away white working class voters from their Roosevelt-era adherence to the Democrats.

The Democratic Party, meanwhile, was often its own worst enemy, embracing interest group politics and betraying a distrust of business and capitalism that was at odds with American sensibilities. President Clinton interrupted years of Republican dominance of Presidential elections only by defanging these two ideas. He actively embraced business and free markets -- even though he took a more moderate approach to regulation than his Republican opponents. And he embraced policies that had previously been taboo for Democrats, such as welfare reform, implying that he was more interested in the public interest than the demands of specific Democratic Party interest groups.

This kind of Clintonian “triangulation,” as it has been called, seems unnecessary today to the optimists about the Democratic Party’s future. The fundamental advantage the Democratic Party has, its greater affinity for the attitudes of the growing segments of the electorate, seems adequate to secure its future.

The Republican Party’s domination by what had been its fringe elements only adds to that optimism. The parallels to the history of the Democratic Party in the 1970s and 80s suggest that the Republican Party is almost certainly going to be hostage to these fringe elements for some time to come. Without electoral success to resolve the debate, disputes will continue between various strands of conservatism, with their differing views on the relative importance of social issues, American international involvement, and personal freedoms. These debates will provide plenty of opportunities for Democrats to point to reasons for the electorate not to vote Republican, much as the interest group posturing within the Democratic Party in the last decades of the twentieth century provided Republicans with arguments to peel away previously Democratic voters.

But the American public remains ideologically conservative and operationally liberal.1 Polling data makes it clear that Americans think government should be limited, that the free enterprise system and the upward mobility it provides are what make the United States great and different than other countries, all of which makes them ideologically conservative. Thus, the United States is the only developed country where roughly a third of the electorate always thinks that taxes are too high, regardless of how high they are.

But the same electorate is protective of the role of government when specifics are at is- sue, liking how Medicare performs, approving of Social Security, and supportive of un- employment insurance and other measures designed to help those in temporary distress through no fault of their own. Hence, when it comes to the operations of government, they are liberals. The close debate over Obamacare revealed this divide clearly, with many voters reluctant to allow the government to expand its role in a sixth of the US economy, and the rest convinced that it was necessary because the previous system was denying people health care for no good reason.

The debate over how to resolve the so-called fiscal cliff is another example of this fundamental dynamic. As the American population ages, the pressure to assure that retirees have access to a minimum standard of living and increasingly expensive health care puts the ideological conservatism and the operational liberalism of the American electorate in direct conflict. This is an inescapable debate. Making good on the promises of Social Security and Medicare, not to mention Obamacare, inevitably means that a larger share of the American economy will be funded by the government, that transfer payments will be a much larger share of the government budget and consequently that the government budget will be a larger share of American GDP.2

We should hardly be surprised that this creates a difficult political issue to resolve, as each end of the political spectrum can find reasons to believe that the electorate wants one or the other of the two mutually incompatible outcomes. What the American system will inevitably force is an outcome that will be ideologically conservative but operation- ally liberal in some fashion. Just as Obamacare was a series of Republican ideas about how to change the health care system rather than the liberal ideal of a single-payer system, a resolution will have to acknowledge the fiscal reality that spending for the growing sectors of the economy will be funded by the government, but will do so in a way that mitigates the otherwise straightforward liberal response of relying solely on increasing taxes to put the government on a fiscally sustainable trajectory.

But, sooner or later, what happened in California with the passage of Proposition 30 in the 2012 election will happen to the federal government. Restrictions on government spending will become so visibly counter-productive that taxes will go up substantially as a result of popular pressure to do so, and Grover Norquist and the no-tax pledge will be- come a historical curiosity. The budget crisis will be resolved because, as Ben Stein famously put it, things that are unsustainable tend to stop.

What is important in this dynamic is the crab-wise way in which the American system changes. The elaborate checks and balances of the system mean that the chances of radical shifts in direction are small. They also mean that compromise must be found when problems must be resolved. This crab-like experimentation is very familiar to students of biological evolution, which often proceeds by incremental experiments until a successful adaptation explodes in numbers.

It is also clear that changes in the center of gravity in public opinion come about at a generational pace. As each generation absorbs the critical events of its period of maturation, there is a crystallization of attitudes that then persist through that generation’s civic life. Most children and adults shaped by the Great Depression had no doubt of the efficacy of government, just as most adults and children of the Reagan years were sure that government was the problem rather than the solution. Today, Millennial generation attitudes to- ward activism and community spirit and social tolerance are increasingly displacing Reagan-era attitudes in the electorate, a process that will run for some years to come.

So we can reasonably expect that the resolution of the debate currently underway about the proper size and role of the government in funding transfer payments will have produced a more secure, more equitably distributed set of social rewards and responsibilities, one in which universal health care and the rights of individual citizens previously unprotected will have been secured, so much so that these matters will be taken for granted. At that point Democrats will be resting on their laurels, certain of the support of the Millennials, the largest generation in American history, and a robustly diverse society.

But it is equally certain that at some point this trend will run its course. While it is likely to be at least a decade or two in the future, there will come a point at which attitudes to- ward government will swing away from today’s trends and back toward celebrating individual liberty and success as the supreme values that voters want embodied in the approach to government. As Mark Twain is said to have remarked, history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

By that time, candidates with fringe ideas in the Republican Party will have repeatedly failed to win general election contests despite dominating the party’s nomination processes. With the possible exception of the culturally conservative South, the party will be open to a run for President by a candidate who, Clinton-like, denounces the fringe views and nevertheless wins the Republican nomination and the general election by focusing solely on economic opportunity. Exactly what the policy questions of that era will be cannot be easily discerned at this remove. But it seems likely that the inherent suspicion with which the Democratic coalition treats business and capitalism will not have abated, and that there will be reasonable policy ideas along that line that a socially moderate but fiscally conservative candidate could exploit to pull together a winning coalition.

Much as Republicans might wish to accelerate this resurgence, the odds are against it occurring any time soon. There is too much demographic momentum behind the Democratic coalition at this point. The trend will favor increased Democratic dominance for some time to come, even though more capable candidates and lower off-year voter turn- out may cause interruptions. The importance of fringe elements in the Republican Party also will limit the chances of a near-term reversal of fortune by making it too hard to convincingly recast the Republican Party brand as socially tolerant.

But just as surely, the pendulum will swing back again over time. In fact, it is this dynamic that has played a key role in the successful social cohesion of the United States over time, despite the unusually diverse nature of its population and periodic massive changes in its ethnic composition due to substantial periodic increases in immigration.

The right balance between government activism and free markets is just that, a balance. American politics is often focused on how to strike that balance. For example, for much of the past few decades, American public opinion held that divided government, with neither party in control of both Congress and the White House, was the best outcome be- cause it limited the damage the government could cause. Today, that consensus has been undermined as voters have come to appreciate that gridlock is not as useful when government action is needed.

What has actually been at stake in these debates is which is the right way to lean under the conditions of the time. With the benefit of hindsight, one can argue that the importance of economic growth to the United States was paramount after the economic and social shocks of the early 1970s, and that giving free rein to business was reasonable government policy for the ensuing era, facilitating greater innovation and expansion than would otherwise have occurred. Likewise, recovering from the excesses that expansion created while redressing growing inequality and working out the specifics by which in- creased transfer payments are to be funded by government spending may be equally important to assure social cohesion in the coming decades.

The conservatism of the American system of government, with its Constitutional guardianship of individual rights and protections against overreach by transitory majorities, has proven adept at adaptation in this way throughout its history. To be sure, the difficulty of getting government to act can be frustrating to those sure of the right path forward. But the crab-like experimentation that is characteristic of the system, with forward movement only when there is a strong consensus, has been well tested over time by numerous circumstances. There is no reason to doubt it will rise to the latest challenge as well.

Bernard Winograd, December 2012

–––––––––––

1 The earliest formulation of this argument, which Morley and his co-author Mike Hais elaborated on in their work, appears to be Hadley Cantril and A. Lloyd’s work The Political Beliefs of Americans, published in 1969 -- the point being that it has been true for quite some time that we know of, and seems to be a very stable feature of American pub- lic opinion.

2 For a fascinating discussion of why health care costs are so hard to contain, and why we shouldn’t worry so much about it, see The Cost Disease: Why Computers Get Cheaper and Health Care Doesn’t by William J. Baumol and others, September 2012. "

** The main thing that occupies my attention when I think of blogs is the fascination people have with religion. I want to stomp my feet and bang my fist and say that I know FROM EXPERIENCE that it is all bullshit. Just because you FEEL better knowing that there is a benevolent force operating in your favor in the universe, doesn't make it so. There is no such thing. We have no allies but each other – for whatever that is worth. You don't have to LIKE truth to believe in it. I hate it that there's no imaginary friend to lift me up and out of the human condition. It gives me NO COMFORT AT ALL to believe that everything that pains me is an illusion. Pain is painful, and I know pain. I don't like it. Religion, spirituality, belief, faith – whatever you want to call it – is just a DRUG. I know about drugs and I use them. But at least I know they are drugs and that they are altering my perception of the world. And at least for a time the sense of pain is dulled. But religious fanatics don't know that. They think that to believe in the ridiculous is enough to prove that what they believe is actually real. Life is awful – and to expect to survive it is folly.

**December is a time of anniversaries, when I reflect on what has gone before. My life feels like a series of novels, stories that reflect the depths and shallows, the highways and side roads of my experience. A large part of that consists of the books I read. Herewith is a list of books read this year with my rating, which simply expresses my current recollection of the experience.

Title	Author	✮
Talking Heads' Fear of Music (33 1/3)	Jonathan Lethem	4
Daddy Issues	Lindsay Marks	3
How Music Works Black, White, Blue	David Byrne William Swanson	5 5
Joseph Anton: A Memoir	Salman Rushdie	4
Canada	Richard Ford	5
The Lay of the Land: Bascombe Trilogy (3)	Richard Ford	5
Independence Day: Bascombe Trilogy (2)	Richard Ford	5
The Sportswriter: Bascombe Trilogy (1)	Richard Ford	5
A Universe from Nothing	Lawrence Krauss	5
We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency	Parmy Olson	4
Patriots	David Frum	4
Schmidt Delivered	Louis Begley	5
Schmidt Steps Back	Louis Begley	5
Heroes and Monsters: An Honest Look at What It Means to Be Human	Josh James Riebock	1
Monday Mornings: A Novel	Sanjay Gupta	4
Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power	Rachel Maddow	5
Gods Without Men	Hari Kunzru	4
Molly Fyde and the Parsona Rescue	Hugh Howey	3
Wool	Hugh Howey	5
An Available Man: A Novel	Hilma Wolitzer	5
Micro: A Novel	Michael Crichton/Richard Preston	0
Thinking, Fast and Slow	Daniel Kahneman	4
1Q84	Haruki Murakami	4

You know it’s going to be one of THOSE emails when…

**You know it’s going to be one of those emails when you see these at the top of the page: 

It means the sender is most likely older, or more correctly, unsophisticated in modern communications. Those lines mean you are being sent a message that has previously been forward many, many times by similarly unsophisticated communicators. It probably also means they are so passionate about the subject that they don’t hesitate to spew it around liberally. Which doesn’t mean they’re a Liberal – most likely the opposite.

And if the next thing you see is a picture of Ben Stein looking dour and pompous as usual

then you know they’re not a Liberal.

And when the message is presented in 36-point EndTimes Extra Bold – in color of course – and in italics – you know you’re in for a right wing christian screed:

And if it comes from a relative, then you know it’s going to be a pile of right wing religious bullshit – because as far as I know all my relatives are right wing Christians. 

I don’t get as much of this crap as I used to, because early on I let people know I wasn’t interested in their religious or political views.  But every now and then righteous amnesia, or something, overtakes them and they send out drivel like his hoping it will be a “comfort” to me, whom they believe to be languishing in atheistic angst. (I am, but their drug is no longer a palliative for me). 

Maybe it’s because of the “holiday” season, and it gets harder to maintain customary prudence and yield to the pent up desire to celebrate one’s delusions and disseminate them widely, like xmas gifts.

I was going to post the forwarded message here but then realized it would make this diatribe much longer, but also would be cooperating with the evangelical recklessness of the original poster and help spread manure on what they hope will be a field of fresh-grown recruits. If you’re really interested, you can look it up using the clues I’ve given above.

I did a Reply All to that message so that the rest of the family would have no doubt about where I stand. Here’s the reply:

I must have been put on this distribution list by mistake. I am a born-again atheist who thinks Ben Stein reached his peak of intelligence when he did voice overs for Garfield.

That prompted a reply from the original sender:

No mistake. I don't use distribution lists. What little I forward goes only to those I love and care about. Funny, I thought "born again" and "atheist" were mutually exclusive. Be careful what you close your mind to; it's the only one you have, and darkness is clarity, as ignorance is bliss.

Finally, it's the message not the messenger you should pay attention to. 

And my reply to that (and only to the sender, not All):

"Born again." Ah, you get the irony. In my case it means, been-there-done-that-got-the-t-shirt so I know it's all bullshit. And my atheism is only one degree more than yours: I include your god in the same list as you include everyone else's. 
When considering the message, it's wise to consider the source. I defer, not to BenStein but to Einstein, who said "The only difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."
My mind is closed to what I saw when it was open to this monstrous belief in an imaginary friend.

And then today, this from one of the All (notice the BloodOfChrist font):

Make no mistake for sure....the message has meaning to all of us. I personally take offense at anyone who expects me to respect their views and rights, but finds it completely fine...even their right and their privilege to stomp all over my rights as a Catholic, as a Christian and as a Parent. Thanks Daddy, From a standpoint of someone who is growing the future leaders of this country.

It’s the last line that bothered me and prompted me to write (the rest is the usual paranoid fist-pounding). This person has no idea of what “the future leaders of this country” will most likely be. This is someone who obviously doesn’t realize that “this country” isn’t what they thought it was going to be when they were young. It is increasingly diverse in cultures, ethnicities and religious persuasions, most of which are neither Christian nor Jewish. It also ignores the fact that the portion of the population who today profess to be “non-believers” in any kind of god-like entity has increased from 8% in 1990 to 15% today. And this percentage is expected to grow. The “future leaders of this country” are more likely to be secular than religious, and most of them will be atheists. 

The brainwashing of children by religious parents is one of the most egregious silent crimes being perpetrated daily. But I expect that a goodly portion of those kids will be able to break out of the mental addictions their parents are cultivating in them. With a more educated populace, and continued rapid advances in science and technology, fewer young people will be enticed to hold to ideas that are so patently ridiculous. Even those who are right now being “raised” by parents who hope they will become fully robotized religious fanatics like themselves and get this nation back to its religious roots. 

And by the way, the assumption that America was founded AS a christian nation is bogus. It was founded as a place where even religious people could believe whatever claptrap they want without having the government prevent them. Here’s an excerpt from my handy “Atheist Pocket Debater,” an iPhone app:

Our Constitution contains no mention of a God, a Creator, or Christianity. It is a secular document. It mentions religion only once, in a passage dealing with religious freedom, which states, “No religious test shall be required to serve public office.” 

…

Many of our founding fathers and patriots were not Christians. They were Deists! These include Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, James Monroe, James Madison, John Adams, and Thomas Paine. Some actually having much contempt for Christianity. Thomas Jefferson created the “Jeffersonian Bible,” in which he removed all of the supernatural events and miracles of Jesus, just keeping his teachings. Payne wrote” The Age of Reason,” a scathing critique of the Bible

And when these fist-pounders insist on the right to brainwash their children, and to be free to perform whatever form of hideous rituals and practices their delusions encourage regardless of their impact on innocents and bystanders, they grab all the freedom for themselves and leave the rest of society in want. In my own case, the belief that a god-like power would rescue a child dying from acute diabetes is not a delusion that anyone should have the right to practice without constraint. 

Religion thrives in a climate of fear. It shrivels in an atmosphere of reason, education and free discourse. What these spammers are possessed by is the fear that they could be punished for not believing enough in nonsense. They fear hell, and the wrath of some Uber-Parent they might piss off. So an underlying motive is to spread anxiety (which is why so many of them are Republicans) and in so doing build a widespread climate of cowering religiosity to ratify their own fears.

Follow the Romoney

**My first political video

** I have been working on a video for friends whose parents have just died, in their 90s. So I spend a lot of time viewing photos of these people throughout the years. How vibrant and alive they are! I think of how I try to make my days mean something, prove my existence, contribute something to the future. But I know that, video or no, it will all be dust someday. In the meantime, eat, drink and be merry.

**From way before the god era, this struck a chord in me. And now that I know better, it's an entire symphony.

**The "comforter" is a drug

To those who claim their belief in god is comforting, this from Lawrence Krauss in his new book "A Universe from Nothing."

"…the ultimate arbiter of truth is experiment, not the comfort one derives from one’s a priori beliefs, nor the beauty or elegance one ascribes to one’s theoretical models."

And the truth is that life is hard, unfair, chancy and lethal. So take comfort in religious theories, but you're not going to avoid the truth of life itself.

"It surprises me..."

**I don't publish or respond to the comments I get that are just ad hominem invective. But if there's a bit of a point that gets me thinking, then I do reply to the comment, or in this case post a whole blog entry based on it. Such is the case with a recent comment.

It surprises me that you would have - as an intelligent and already seasoned adult -- found a religion and decided to devote your life to it, and then reach a point where you're trying to disprove the very premise of the religion.

Yeah, it surprised me too. I thought I was just pissed off at Tom and the other phonies who took advantage of my trust (gullibility), but in 2005 after a few months in the California sun - and several months ruminating - I realized that CS was just a more "reasonable" substitute for a deeper delusion in my life. As I've written earlier, I was raised Catholic and was pretty devoted to it - especially as a young person, which is unusual. When you're raised to believe absurdities you seldom question them. So, when I had a problem with religion, I took it as just brand dissatisfaction. I still believed the category itself was legit. After the ensuing wildness, fear zoomed to the forefront and CS appeared on my scene. It promised to make me "good" as religion is supposed to, and since it was almost diametrically opposite to RC it seemed like a complete solution. So for the next 30+ years I tried to live up to what I thought were the ideas and ideals of CS. I even became a staunch defender and apologist - and to some, an example of how liberated it could be. 

But time took its toll on delusion and little by little it disintegrated. Applying my mind to the alternatives I eventually questioned the CATEGORY itself and not just the brand. It was the belief that there is a god or principle that controls the universe, who loves his creation and can intervene when we have problems - and the rest of the 9 yards. Once free to look around at the alternatives I found a rich field of facts that satisfied every objection to the claim of a spiritual dimension and a spiritual principle. 

I can't say I feel happier or more optimistic. Sober is more accurate. I suppose part of the endurance of a delusion is the comfort it can bring at times. Having made up for lost drinking time over those 30+ years, I really do understand the comforting power of mind-altering influences. And its dangers. Happiness is no indicator of rightness or safety. Just because we all desire comfort and happiness doesn't mean it is actually attainable. So arguments for the proof of a benevolent agent based on the way it makes the  believer feel don't sway me. "Truthiness" (per Stephen Colbert) is not the equivalent of truth.

So what is life like without the narcotic of spiritual belief? Not great. But not very different either. Once you understand the totally accidental and unintentional origin of life, that there is no "creator" or "first cause" then you can begin to appreciate the awesomeness of existence - its wonder and its horror. The algorithm that impels complexification has yielded the amazing world we live in. When I look at the natural world, what wows me isn't that some supreme being created it but that each plant, animal - even mineral and gas - is a SURVIVOR! It had countless predecessors, none of which survived. Given the enormity of time and the working of that algorithm  - to make complex things out of simpler components (I'm simplifying here) - an enormity of possibilities can arise. In other words, it doesn't take a watchmaker to make a watch. It just takes time and persistent experimentation. Reading Daniel Dennett's "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" really expanded my view of life. It was the second of his books that I read. The first was "Breaking the Spell." About the time I was clearing out the rubble of my so-called religious life that book had just come out and he was doing radio interviews. I heard just a few minutes of an interview and knew I had to explore his ideas. Richard Dawkins came next. And Sam Harris. And Christopher Hitchens. And Victor Stenger. And some others. 

What impresses me most about these writers is the clarity of their explanations and, except for Hitchens, a lack of (deserved) vitriol. You don't have to be an evolutionary biologist, neuroscientist or physicist to grasp the immense implications of their world view. It blows ”god” and all that ”spiritual” paraphernalia away like chaff. No, these thinkers don't claim that they or science itself has definitive answers for all questions, but the worst of their ideas demolish the best spiritual arguments. And I know the spiritual arguments well. Very well. I used to hone them for warfare on atheism. I taught them, made a career out of being a voice and practitioner for spirituality. I was even trained early in Catholic theology and Thomistic philosophy. I do know my way around these ideas, and have known or heard a great many spokespeople for spiritual belief. I proved my sincerity and my commitment. And not just for a season, but for decades. So, yeah, it's surprising, this complete turnabout. But what's more shocking is how deeply the delusions went and how long they persisted.

Ah, sweetness

**For those who don't follow the comments section, here's part of a response to a recent comment, and some expansion:

Surely you don't begrudge others from all organized religions from feeling content, even happy because of their beliefs? You can't be that bitter?

Got nothing to do with being "bitter." Just as I don't begrudge someone from getting drunk or high in the isolation of their own home or among friends, people can take comfort in their religious delusions. It's when they foist it on others - children and non-believers (think Santorum, Dobson, etc) - that makes them begrudge-able. Any bitterness is sweetened by the clear fact that this organization and its influence in the world is rapidly sinking into impotence.

The fact that a delusion offers "content, even happy" feelings does nothing to convince a true "seeker." It's "truth" we seek, not "truthiness" (as Colbert would put it). And so far, all I've been able to discern that is "true" is what I wrote in a recent song ["Choppy Waters" http://youtu.be/t15Ql0jU7x4]:

"There's no one in charge,
You're a runaway barge,
And mostly you're on your own."

At this late date, the conclusions I've come to are expressed in words at the end of the song::

"Here's a little bit of wisdom I've seen:
From time to time and storm to storm
There's a little bit of peace in-between
That's the time to float [another song]
Make love in your boat
And do it like it's gonna be your last
Next storm run-in you could be succumbin'
And nothing exists in the past."

Chronicle

**I've been asked when it was that I started blogging about my disaffection and break from Christian Science. You can start by looking at my archives from 2007. Pretty much everything I've had to say on this blog has to do with my disengagement from all beliefs in a divine principle, spirituality of all sorts and the delusion of "spiritual healing."

I'm pretty much over the ranting, but am willing to engage with others who may be sensing that the "spiritual" ground on which they stand may be dissolving into its "native nothingness." (haha.)

These days I am happily retired from full time work and spend most of my time writing and producing original music, which is the closest thing to my most natural abilities. You can chck up on that work at these websites: RamonaStGeorge.com and moppoville.com.

I also work part-time at a cool technology store that I am not allowed to identify.