Shyone Posted March 14, 2010 Share Posted March 14, 2010 My thinking went like this: There's no conscious being, no supernatural entity called God, sure, but there is an energy to life, a kind of inter-connectedness that you can plug into. Plugging into the energy called life is the difference between being closed and being open. Being open to life, and all the people and things that you share it with, is obviously going to be advantageous and positive for your life's experience. Opening up to an inter-connectedness is a kind of relationship with life and all other entities, and the only way that a human being can experience relationship is by communicating, and words are our most familiar way of communicating While I was transitioning from agnostic to atheist, I held this belief but after long years of only wishing for feelings of this interconnectedness with no results I realized I was an atheist who only wished there was something more. I wish I felt this spirituality. I'm a materialist atheist, just about as strong as one can be and still be reasonable (I'm not omniscient after all). I do feel an "interconnectedness", but it derives from the realization that a long time ago, one cell came together in some form, and the race was on. The lobsters and crabs I eat are delicious, and they are my distant relatives. The trees were a part of my family that decided to stay put instead of moving. Those damned gnats are my kin folk from another branch of the family. Oh, it's all interconnected all right. Stunningly so. We can eat those forms of life because they are like us with similar chemistry and building blocks. They can eat us for the same reasons. We breathe the air modified by some of our more stationary (and not so stationary) relatives, and we exhale part of their sustenance. Maybe I don't mourn when I have to exterminate my house, but it doesn't mean I don't know that termites are relatives and a part of the reason I am alive. Through chance events in the earth's history, life is what it is, and all life is part of the whole. "We are one." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phanta Posted March 14, 2010 Share Posted March 14, 2010 We're already plugged in. Humanity is a living, writhing, collective entity, from which none of us, even those on the fringes, escape. The idea that we are independent, islands...that's a popular modern notion. I don't see it. And I've always been one to swim upstream. Phanta Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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