I have always wanted the ability to “feel” god so I can be a believer but I have accepted that will never happen.
As someone who transitioned away from Hitchen and Harris style of Atheism, back to faith. It really is a feeling, not a choice or a thought. I feel myself as being part of a larger pattern and trying to fit more into a pattern I sense of the universe than thinking about the origins of the universe.
I've always seen that origin talk as a weird statement those of faith make, having the feeling and looking backwards to the beginning as part of a chain of meaning is really different than sitting from a place of godlessness and wondering why the whole bit got started. Its about feeling yourself as having a place within society and aligning yourself morally with society's foundations, just as much as perceiving a God in this whole shebang.
I like having a rulebook with my wife and neighbors, much more often than I think about God himself. Biologically I serve a role in the species in the same manner I morally serve a role in the universe, I guess is the new feeling I didn't have before. I just feel a part of a greater whole, like a good citizen watches the national sport in a sane society.
I don't know if that's helpful or even understandable, sorry if it is not.
I was raised Catholic and maintained a serious, personal beliefs in God until the new atheism wave, Hitchens Harris Dawkins est. It all seemed inevitable, we only needed to logic away the religious, and all would be well. It helped that most of the 'debates' between atheists and theists was one sided and against generally foolish individuals.
I had to think long and hard about what was the essential component that this atheism brought to me which was to allow me to think that by passively participating in it, what afterwards turned out to largely be mid-wit thinking against kind and patient Christians, I was smarter than a lot of the world and all the greatest thinkers that had come before me. I had this new insight, and it changed everything. There was just some kind of self-gratification that I, and a lot of young men, wanted to do. And I wanted to cut every corner of defeating counter-arguments that I could to do it. But worse than that, I was cutting further corners by letting another do the work I should be acting out in order to become a man and rule my life. Atheism, really just draws in the same crowd as Cuckoldry, it is form of passive intellectual gratification akin more to porn and drugs than actual movements or free-thinking. I wasn't smarter than Christians, I was drugging myself with a feeling of false superiority rather than acting in my own life. I left Canada, because it largely embodied that feeling nationally, over it.
We were Atheists because we were on the right side of history, we were progressing society, and we were the smartest people in the room because of it. if we just used our common sense, and followed the dotted lines that were laid out before us by this sort of people, we would be saving the world and putting superstition in its place. In reality, what we were doing was following along this fixed dialectic path on neutronium rails going through the institutional ride of maybe college but certainly then in post-degree professions. All new atheism played for my generation was to convince us that we were smarter than all previous generations of humans, smarter than the traditional modes & traditional moralities that would place constraints on the behavior we wanted to have as 20-something young guys, all of those constraints were stupid and ridiculous and didn't need to be looked into simply because we used our own common sense. Its the role, for my generation, that Vaush and Hassan play for the current Zoomer generation.
Once you hear the modern atheists speak about Wokeism without mentioning once Atheism+ and that whole debacle which unseated them initially years before,
Once you hear Sam Harris speak about Hunter Biden's Laptop being a non-issue because the a priori assumptions of Biden vs Trump electorally are simply already socially agreed upon rather than instead being part of the #1 issue of America tearing itself apart,
And once you notice that a decade later none of the "I do by philosophy what others do for fear of God" people seem to like each other or form much of a community any more,
then you suddenly feel the cringe of it all. Its so much intellectual posturing, they simply were anti-christian whatever Sam's little note at the end of his book about needing to murder Muslims if they ever got the bomb.
New Atheism and the so-bad-that-its-forgotten Atheism+ are so corny now that I'm ashamed that I ever believed these men. They appear evil to me, even though that's probably an over-reaction to my previous trust of them.
