Struggling For Meaning

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Has anyone struggled through any of this?  How do you deal with the loneliness, hopelessness, the lack of sense of purpose in life that comes with becoming an ex-Christian?  I don't know how to handle this.

 

Yes. I don't know either, but I have thought a lot about it and I think I make a pretty decent attempt.

 

Loneliness: Join real-world groups of likeminded people and meet up. There will be groups of people living simply and giving generously, organisations working for sustainability, tons of people trying to combat all the injustices you mentioned. This will cover your desire to work alongside others on a 'mission' that's important to you. There's no reason why that mission you embarked on in a religious context cannot be carried on in the wider world. In many ways it'll be more interesting and you'll find the issues will be covered in new and unique ways by different approaches. Nothing can quite compare to fellowship with other ex-believers, so in terms of real-world groups check out 'Recovery from Religion'.

 

Hopelessness: Someone mentioned opening Pandora's Box. Interestingly, the only thing that was left when everything escaped was hope. Hope to me just means believing that something good will happen after some current bad situation. The Christian conception assumes that the earthly life is bad, and therefore we need something good after it in the form of heaven. I disagree. I think if you adopt a certain mindset, you will view life as inherently good. Of course bad things do happen, to some much more than others depending on the luck of your birth and environment. Some bad things you can do something about - that goes back to continuing your fight against injustice - but some you can't. So what is there to base hope on? Well, we know that we live on a remarkably hospitable and fertile planet, that will provide us with food, water, beauty and diversity to explore it and understand it, in a time when humans before us have built up great cities and countries meaning we have hospitals, schools, law and order, most of us enjoy relative peace and security, and most of all we have the opportunity to meet and form relationships with other human beings and even other animals, we can talk and discuss and find meaning in art and friendship and love and building stuff. So we know that if bad stuff happens we have all of that to fall back on, all of that will be there to provide us with some new happiness, or share our sadness with, or make sense of our sadness, and perhaps most of all we can join in the project of progress in some way, adding our own little unique stamp, even if we just plant a tree, or write a line of computer code, or brighten someone's day with flowers. We create our own hope for each other. Hope comes from the gains of civilisation, which we need to cherish, protect, and build upon. Hope also comes from our own attitude. Like I said, we can't always control what happens around us, but we can control how we choose to view it. We can choose to focus on the positives, and celebrate them, and if not ignore the negatives at least put them into perspective, let them be an interesting chapter in your book, but not the final chapter or the defining one.

 

 

 

 I believe that the injustice in the world that we couldn't stop now would be met with justice in heaven. 

 

The answer to injustice that we are unable to stop now is not to hope or pretend it will be stopped in another realm by someone else - quite apart from anything else that is likely to make us step back from any action that might prevent it. The answer is to figure out what we need to do to stop it in the fairest and most peaceful way possible, then get together the resources to do it. This is the mark of a mature society, rather like when you become an adult and realise no one else is going to do the dishes, so the only way they will get done is to do them yourself.

 

You might read the Oresteia by Aeschylus. It's a trilogy of tragedies by an Ancient Greek playwright. A cycle of revenge killing leads the eponymous Orestes to be plagued by spirits of guilt who accuse him day and night of an act of evil. The goddess Athena hears their cries, as well as those of Apollo who thinks Orestes act was justified, and decides to set up the first official trial in Athens in order to settle the case that way. The play represents the transition in Athens from religious forms of justice to the humanist approach, that of a state democracy with rule of law, basing the punishment on a rational and consistent examination of the evidence and a set of laws that draw on our innate compassion and humanity.

 

Finally, I don't think all of what you described above in your former christian life is gone. In fact I think barely any of it is: Christianity is a veneer, albeit a complex one that encompassed many aspects of your life. But you are still you, you retain all of those desires, values, aspects of your personality. Now you are free to explore them in whatever way you like. After deconversion I said to an atheist friend 'Now I feel like there is nothing', and he simply replied, 'Or maybe now there is everything?'

 

Christopher Hitchens, in his autobiography Hitch-22, wrote the following:

 

"A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humour, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless'"