Being an atheist, I am 99% certain that if I kill myself, that’s it: the end of the road. Once dead, I am completely removed from a position where I am able to do any good. And there’s no turning back from that position once I’m there.

I have contemplated suicide a couple of times, and each time I remember that if I did, I would lose every chance that I have of doing good – of improving the world, making things right with my parents, or whathaveyou. And I find that I’m not ready to give that up.

MikeClawson said,

December 17, 2007 at 11:44 pm

Well, take your pick. There’s not always only one right answer.

Then the reasoning is always up to us. I just don’t see how a god is involved in any of it and, if he was, why he’s only partially involved.

Joel Sax said,

December 18, 2007 at 1:30 am
(Change God to Universe and you have a nice atheist/agnostic description of why bad things happen to good people.)

Once again–no god. Arbitrary and random. People came up with reasons to try to explain the chaos and put a framework on the void and the god-concept is an offshoot of that.

I think this person said Goodbye to All That. And I understand.

Yes! This is the way I understood the postcard, too. After years of struggling with the paradoxical and insensitive teachings of my family’s religion, and after years of feeling as if I’d been abandoned or disregarded by “God”, I finally quit the god game, and it’s been quite freeing. My life is mine now, and I have control. Sure, difficult situations arise, even seemingly unsurmountable ones. Once I stopped feeling as if there ought to be some kind of god-related aspect to various situations, I felt much less paralyzed by circumstance and more able to see clearly and be proactive about things. Gone, too, was the despair I’d sink into over how a loving god could “let” this happen, or would refuse to respond to prayer, or would randomly “reward” someone else in a similar situation but “punish” me.

In short, I stopped letting a non-present, non-responsive entity make me feel like crap all the time.

Or we are not capable of comprehending the reasons.

Or the reason is simply that it’s just the way things are.

It sounds like a shell game to me.

Mike, would that be that god doesn’t know or he’s not revealing the reasons to us at the present moment?

Or we are not capable of comprehending the reasons.

Or the reason is simply that it’s just the way things are.

Sometimes shit just happens and even God doesn’t have a good answer for us.

Mike, would that be that god doesn’t know or he’s not revealing the reasons to us at the present moment?

Believers can turn to the book of Job. Mind you that scholars feel that the whole business of the bet was added later by some pundit who didn’t get the rest of the story. Job loses everything. He has three friends who tell him that it was somehow his fault even though he was a virtuous man. Then God comes to Job in the whirlwind and says “You can’t hope to understand why this happened. Just live a good life.”

And I think both are powerful messages. I can’t hope to understand why, in this wide wide universe, I was born with bipolar disorder. Sure I know the science. But if I ask a bigger Why I am burdened with a despair for which there is no answer. And so the best thing to do is not to ask the Why, to just live through episodes of the disease as best I can.

I think this person said Goodbye to All That. And I understand.