Honestly, before I begin, I really want to preface that I am not an expert on this topic. My abilities to determine what is right and what is wrong has been heavily skewed by a lot of outside influence that was placed upon me since my youth. If you read this article, you are probably close to me enough to know that I was born into a Southern Baptist small town and was a regular church goer. Then, I slowly moved away from that worldview later on in high school and was an atheist by the time I was starting college. No one knows this, but this worldview began over something that I as an adult consider very childish; my crush not having the same feelings for me. I didn’t even ponder on this catalyst until recently; however, well before then, I’ve watch several different YouTube videos on the topic, meditated, talk with people on both sides on the isle, and my current therapist is a Methodist.

I, however, find myself in a safe space on atheist individuals and I am very grateful for their continued positivity and their care for me as an individual, which isn’t something I really got out of Christians once I became an atheist. Almost every dedicated Christian I know (attending church and very active in the church community) has this want to include me and an imbalance of connection that occurs when I reject their offer. At least on my end, that’s how it feels. My therapist is an exception to this for the most part, though she has made the nod to attend church a couple of times. And while my perspective might seem unique, it is also my truth. I am not interested in joining a church ever again. My personal views ties into the rest of this article, which I will get to.

Before I go to far into the article, I do want to preface that I do identify as an atheist. Regardless of what information here might seem contrary to the belief, I do believe that their is no Creator being or religious figurehead(s) ruling over us in silence secretly judging our every action and determining them to be morally righteous or not. This includes any other descriptions of deities. I cannot answer every question one might have regarding this topic either, for I am not the an amazing atheist philosopher or anything worthy of much intelligence.

That would have been one route to take; getting a degree in philosophy, debating tough topics consistently and having a stable foothold in one’s grounded understanding of literature and common takes in order to rationalize a response. I am not knocking that approach to this question down, for a lot about Christianity is rooted in teachings of the Bible and it’s meaning. And there are a lot of Christians who debate on the ideas presented in this book are literal in nature. Even when I was a Christian, I rejected that notion and believed that at the end of the day, these stories are to bring about meaning to help one understand consequences of actions taken by those worthy of note vs just literal description of events. Then, I realized that a lot of those events did actually occur and the ones that didn’t occur are really fantastical in nature (Moses parting the Red Sea and most of the Book of John, for example) and it drew me further away of these beliefs.

The unfortunate thing is a lot of healthy habits went away with my disbelief. I became obsessed with attention. I became traumatized by observing my family, slowly watching them all fail to understand life to such a degree that they descended into bad drug addictions that almost cost them their life, and almost cost the life of my nephew. I grew very scared of women, and not necessarily disrespecting them but not seeing them as completely human due to a growing shame of bad behaviors and mistakes I’ve made in their presence, while also loving/lusting them so much I couldn’t handle it. Craving connection while simultaneously losing my ability to connect.

This has lead me back to the idea of God recently as I expand myself to the possibility of my failure to hold onto who I am internally and showcase it to everyone I know. I believe this article is a finality to this discussion of thoughts in my head regarding the topic, but I also have obsessed with this so much that I feel a madness brewing inside it seems. However, with my meditations that guide me towards my emotional wellbeing, I find myself still aligning to a atheist worldview and I do find comfort in that more so now due to having a healthy support system. I have to admit that the only support system I had for my lack of belief was one individual; a woman who was my friend for 6 years who I completely flipped on once she told me about her divorce and no longer continued to interact with me. However, all I did was express my feelings.

I still don’t feel very safe expressing myself or my emotions, but my current friend group is slowly helping me with this and there has been progress in me feeling more safe to express myself. I am also working on reparenting myself so that I have a better understanding of emotions of others while holding up boundaries for myself. I am also working on just giving myself what I want within my control and getting rid of things I know longer need or want. And not doing things for anyone else other than me and being content with that. However, while I have made significant progress with my mental state, there is still something else missing. And, I hate to say this, but it’s God.

So, just to clarify, my intelligence regarding the existence of God and my emotional belief of the existence of God clash each other. Both of these things are true at the same time. It’s like when you first realized Santa wasn’t real and you were in denial, still slightly believing in him. You knew factually he didn’t exist but still felt that he did, so you denied the intellect inside you. Unfortunately for those who would much rather have me believe, I do not deny my intellect in this situation. At the end of the day, I am an atheist. So, what is happening?

To put it simply, it’s that I haven’t grieved for the lost of God. I never truly confronted this reality and disassociated from it for a long time. I wasn’t in touch with my emotions and I suffered for it. Not only that, but the grief I would face would be immense. We are talking about the lost of a being who loved me, who I never saw but was always watching with me. My beliefs might not have been strong enough to read the entire Bible, but they were strong enough for me to believe someone is there for me. That ideal gave me a lot of joyous moments in my teenage years.

However, I have two take regarding this that are both true and sad as well. First take is I believe it is sad that I needed a belief based off fiction to provide an emotional anchor in order to know what love is. My family was never interested in attending to those emotions and I instead relied on the belief in God and when I rejected it, I never did find a replacement and I found (and still find) myself in an immense loneliness that wouldn’t exist if my family loved me enough in the first place. Another sad take is that in order for me to reach my truest potential, I might need to feed that emotional well I had before with the belief in God as an emotional support reparenting device. And this is because of how I was raised and what you can change and what you can’t change.

I know God doesn’t exist, and I am not going to go to any individual and try to persuade them to believe in a God in any way. I believe this religious complex is a psychological tool and system based on indoctrination in order to manipulate masses for the betterment of a patriarchal society. Period. I also believe that children of my nephews’ generation and later will come to be able to have the same connection within themselves some secular individuals have without needed to believe in a God at all. I also, controversially, believe that if you were raised in an abusive, chaotic environment that included secular ideals, your inner child will always crave it and you’ll never have true internal peace unless you give your inner child what it always had in order to deal with what was going on around them at the time. I’ve met many individuals who grew up in similar situations as I did and they all shared the same qualities as I did regarding not being able to express their emotions. Or even going as far as to lie about or not directly confront the reason why they are not interested in my friendship anymore. I also shared these issues.

I have no idea what this means for my future. However, if I just lean into what I just stated, I feel much more comfortable with myself. That is all that matters at the end of the day. No, I am not interested in Christianity at all, or any other religion. This isn’t able reparenting behaviors I’ve had, this is about re-healing my inner child. With this in mind, you can call me an agnostic spiritual atheist. That means I am someone who isn’t sure if God exists, feels a connection with a spirit inside him and recognizes what that is and what it means for myself while outwardly expressing that I do not believe in a Creator of any kind. This might seem confusing, but ultimately that is my final verdict on God; he doesn’t actually exist but I attach myself to the feeling of his existence to help regulate my emotions, for I cannot change the 80% of my brain that was formed around the theory/belief that he did exist. Thank you for reading and have a wonderful day.