Knowing truth doesn’t provide, by itself, human connection. In the Mormon church you had a community, people with whom you interacted and had a common ground, shared interests, and collective goals. When one breaks with such a community, without having first established a new one, the result may be extreme loneliness.
The way to fix that is to find a new community. Many atheists and rationalists schedule periodic meetings to interact with each other and talk in person, so depending on your need of connection that might suffice. If not, there are church-like organizations that require no profession of faith and welcome atheists, which is particularly effective if one’s been raised with church attendance and miss that. In the US Unitarian Universalism is one of the oldest movements along those lines, with the form of Protestant Christianity minus the belief system, but there are others. This CBS article lists several: Inside the “secular churches” that fill a need for some nonreligious Americans.
If you’re not particularly attached with atheism itself, you also have the option of exploring personal religiosity and communities that go along with those, which basically means constructing your own religion from your own experiences, which can be induced through mean ranging from meditation and self-suggestion all the way to psychedelic trips. Doing that while remaining 99% a rationalist isn’t particularly difficult, the cost being embracing compartmentalization. But then, if that’s what it takes for one to find enough meaning in the world that they want to continue on it, I’d say it’s a price well worth paying. It’s what I myself do, and it hasn’t caused me any major problem, my take simply being that, if what I perceive is true, science will eventually catch-up, and if it isn’t, as long as I’m not trying to assert it above the perfectly legitimate skepticism of others, then shrugs.
So, my suggestion, in order, would be: meet other atheists and rationalists in real life with some regularity; if that isn’t enough, try a church-like atheist/agnostic/agnostic-friendly community; and if that still isn’t enough, do your own thing with others doing similarly.
An excellent series of suggestions. At the moment, I haven’t left the Church’s community, so I don’t feel that loss just yet. I’ll still keep that in mind.
As for coming up with a “personal religion”, I’ll have to give that some thought. Arguably the one real-world religion that comes closest to my personal understanding of objective reality is Secular Buddhism. Perhaps embracing that more fully could give me some peace.
At the moment, I haven’t left the Church’s community, so I don’t feel that loss just yet.
There’s a potential middle-way there.
I don’t know much about Mormonism, mind, but I watch and read a Biblical scholar, Dan McClellan, who’s skeptical of everything and then some. His YouTube channel, and other videos in which he appears, as well as his papers and books, are all in line with the academic consensus in Biblical scholarship, meaning he deconstructs every single Christian belief (and most Jewish ones too) to the point it’s easy to assume he’s a militant Atheist. But he’s actually a practicing Mormon, and his intense criticism extends to the books of the Mormon canon.
Contacting him might thus help. if someone like him can be an active member of the LDS church, even if it’s in some kind of minority movement, you might find a way to similarly keep both things going.
Arguably the one real-world religion that comes closest to my personal understanding of objective reality is Secular Buddhism.
That’s what I myself follow, mixed with some Taoism and Shinto. It’s a combination that works well for me.
If you go with Buddhism, it’ll help to familiarize yourself with the concept of Apatheism, which is distinct from Theism, Atheism and Agnosticism, and see if you’d be comfortable adopting it, since that’s the Buddhist take on things.
To summarize: Theisms care about deities and affirm their existence. Atheism cares about deities and affirms they don’t exist. Agnosticism cares about deities and wishes it knew if one or the other take. As such, all three fall under the umbrella term Patheism: caring about the existence or inexistence of deities.
Apatheism is strict indifference towards deities. There are Apatheists who think deities exist, but if they don’t, nothing of import was lost. There are those who think they don’t exist, but if perchance they do, they still don’t matter much, or at all (though in that case it’s advisable to try and teach them Buddhism too, so they become better deities). And there are those who don’t know, and really don’t care. So Apatheism has equivalents to Theism, Atheism and Agnosticism, but their Apatheistic counterparts are so weakly distinct it barely registers.
Buddhism is the Apatheistic religion par excellence, so adopting that rather than Atheism or Agnosticism makes it much easier to understand its philosophy and to put it into practice.
Knowing truth doesn’t provide, by itself, human connection. In the Mormon church you had a community, people with whom you interacted and had a common ground, shared interests, and collective goals. When one breaks with such a community, without having first established a new one, the result may be extreme loneliness.
The way to fix that is to find a new community. Many atheists and rationalists schedule periodic meetings to interact with each other and talk in person, so depending on your need of connection that might suffice. If not, there are church-like organizations that require no profession of faith and welcome atheists, which is particularly effective if one’s been raised with church attendance and miss that. In the US Unitarian Universalism is one of the oldest movements along those lines, with the form of Protestant Christianity minus the belief system, but there are others. This CBS article lists several: Inside the “secular churches” that fill a need for some nonreligious Americans.
If you’re not particularly attached with atheism itself, you also have the option of exploring personal religiosity and communities that go along with those, which basically means constructing your own religion from your own experiences, which can be induced through mean ranging from meditation and self-suggestion all the way to psychedelic trips. Doing that while remaining 99% a rationalist isn’t particularly difficult, the cost being embracing compartmentalization. But then, if that’s what it takes for one to find enough meaning in the world that they want to continue on it, I’d say it’s a price well worth paying. It’s what I myself do, and it hasn’t caused me any major problem, my take simply being that, if what I perceive is true, science will eventually catch-up, and if it isn’t, as long as I’m not trying to assert it above the perfectly legitimate skepticism of others, then shrugs.
So, my suggestion, in order, would be: meet other atheists and rationalists in real life with some regularity; if that isn’t enough, try a church-like atheist/agnostic/agnostic-friendly community; and if that still isn’t enough, do your own thing with others doing similarly.
An excellent series of suggestions. At the moment, I haven’t left the Church’s community, so I don’t feel that loss just yet. I’ll still keep that in mind.
As for coming up with a “personal religion”, I’ll have to give that some thought. Arguably the one real-world religion that comes closest to my personal understanding of objective reality is Secular Buddhism. Perhaps embracing that more fully could give me some peace.
There’s a potential middle-way there.
I don’t know much about Mormonism, mind, but I watch and read a Biblical scholar, Dan McClellan, who’s skeptical of everything and then some. His YouTube channel, and other videos in which he appears, as well as his papers and books, are all in line with the academic consensus in Biblical scholarship, meaning he deconstructs every single Christian belief (and most Jewish ones too) to the point it’s easy to assume he’s a militant Atheist. But he’s actually a practicing Mormon, and his intense criticism extends to the books of the Mormon canon.
Contacting him might thus help. if someone like him can be an active member of the LDS church, even if it’s in some kind of minority movement, you might find a way to similarly keep both things going.
That’s what I myself follow, mixed with some Taoism and Shinto. It’s a combination that works well for me.
If you go with Buddhism, it’ll help to familiarize yourself with the concept of Apatheism, which is distinct from Theism, Atheism and Agnosticism, and see if you’d be comfortable adopting it, since that’s the Buddhist take on things.
To summarize: Theisms care about deities and affirm their existence. Atheism cares about deities and affirms they don’t exist. Agnosticism cares about deities and wishes it knew if one or the other take. As such, all three fall under the umbrella term Patheism: caring about the existence or inexistence of deities.
Apatheism is strict indifference towards deities. There are Apatheists who think deities exist, but if they don’t, nothing of import was lost. There are those who think they don’t exist, but if perchance they do, they still don’t matter much, or at all (though in that case it’s advisable to try and teach them Buddhism too, so they become better deities). And there are those who don’t know, and really don’t care. So Apatheism has equivalents to Theism, Atheism and Agnosticism, but their Apatheistic counterparts are so weakly distinct it barely registers.
Buddhism is the Apatheistic religion par excellence, so adopting that rather than Atheism or Agnosticism makes it much easier to understand its philosophy and to put it into practice.