I am at an accepting stage that not everything that happens in your life is in your control. When things goes really bad and you dont have much control on it, I would assume a person who believes in god or religious figures has their belief system as a coping mechanism. For example praying to the god and so on.
I passed that stage where you believe a single entity has a complete control of each and everything happens in this entire universe. So falling back to god and thinking it is all according to the plan and he will find out some solution is not really an option for me. At the sametime I also acknowlede that there are some gray areas where science can’t provide a logical explanation so as to why this is happening to some of the life events.
So to atheists of lemmy, how do you cope up with shits that happens in your life that you can’t explain logically and you really don’t have much control?
We atheists are quite capable of talking to imaginary friends too. We just have no delusions that they’re real.
I know I’ve asked for more than a few things to please work out. Couldn’t tell you who I was asking though.
So true, when things get tough I kneel in front of my poster of Sephiroth and mumble incoherently about the Lifestream.
Works as well as when I used to pray tbh.
Ride the wave of chaos on your surfboard of acceptance and enjoy the ride, it’s all we’ve got.
The only time I truly feel alive
Identify which parts I do control and work on them to improve my situation, ask for help from others/professional services if thing go too far.
Just because your faith doesn’t work how you want it to doesn’t mean you are all alone and have to deal with everything alone.
Same here. Focus on what you can control, seek help where possible with things you can’t. If there’s absolutely nothing that can be done about something, there’s no use in worrying about it anyway.
It doesn’t even cross my mind if there is a “greater meaning” when something challenging happens in my life.
What do you mean by “cope”? How do I explain it? Either shit happens because of bad luck (e.g. A bird shits on me) or because someone did something wrong (e.g. Somebody got distracted while driving and broke my side mirror). It’s not supernatural entity, it’s just statistical probability.
How do I cope mentally? Tv, videogames, a beer o two and a nice meal. Talk to my wife. Remember to play with my kids.
I accept the fact that I don’t understand everything, and I get high.
I’ve always found it easier to accept that the universe is fundamentally random and today is my turn in the barrel than wonder why God did this to me.
If I can’t have control over shit happening, then I just don’t care.
I think it was Další Lama who said: “If a problem has a solution, there is no reason to worry. If there is no solution, worrying will not help.”
Can you elaborate what you mean by things that science can’t explain?
Everything came from randomness and is mostly narrated by it, and there’s no escape from it. You may hit the lottery or end up with a rare fatal disease any time, your life will be changed and there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s not about god granting you awards or punishing you, it just happens. From this POV getting depressed because I went through x feels like getting depressed because water flows.
Life is painful, also joyful, beautiful and really ugly, gross and amazing. You’re supposed to fall, get hurt and then get up and run a bit more until you can’t anymore. Every good and bad thing will pass in time
I was talking about the same randomness , as in why it was happening. As you mentioned for example having a rare disease or an accident, you could well explain it with diagnosis and reports on how it formed and what leads to it and so on. But why this is happening to certain people is not really have any control. I mean It is that randomness that we cant explain or atleast I do not understand.
I like your take on the life and how you are accepting all the aspects like pain and joy at the sametime. This to shall pass… Yay!!
It sounds like you’re coming at science from a religious or philosophical standing, and blurring the lines.
Science can explain and account for everything in life, whether you understand it or not.
There are plenty of things that we as humans do not yet understand, but it’s all still science.
The question of ‘why did this have to happen to me/them’ is completely null and void; it’s a question stemming from a belief system, not a scientific system.
Person X got cancer because they were genetically predisposed to it, or they encountered a environmental occurance that caused it. Person Y had a heart attack at 50 and died because they had a preexisting heart condition, or they were unhealthy, or an environmental incident occurred that initied it.
The philosophy of it is not scientific, it’s philosophical and has no valid place in a scientific explanation.
Discussing philosophy can be thought provoking, entertaining, enraging, and enlightening all at the same time, but it’s totally different to discussing science.
As for coping strategies, accepting that some things are simply out of your control is a good place to start. Easier said than done at times, I know. We as humans gravitate towards belief, we’ve likely evolved to do that. But again, that’s science. Know your limits, understand that you won’t always have control, and accept things that are beyond your reach. Life won’t always be fun, but you’re the only person in charge of your own thoughts and feelings. Use that to your advantage whenever you can.
My cousin was a valued member of his rural mountain community. At a Reno air show, the rudder of a P51 racing plane failed (the Galloping Ghost ), and in a stroke of bad luck, veered into the grandstands, exploding messily. Most racing-plane accidents wreck in unoccupied territory, so only the pilot dies. In this case dozens of spectators were injured and nine people died. My cousin was the last of them.
Survived by a wife and two boys, his community couldn’t imagine why God might have gathered him up that day.
There’s no rhyme to it. My cousin got picked in the wrong lottery and perished.
I am so sorry about your cousin. Hope you and the loved ones have the strength to deal with the pain. Dont know what else to say :(
It was in 2011, so at this point it’s history we’ve long processed. I bring it up because for me losing my cousin (possibly the last family beyond my parents with whom I still had contact), it was a clear lesson that ours is a chaotic and unjust world and that if we as a society want it to be more just, it is up to us to make it more so.
We have to be the compassion we want to see in the world, even if this means risking betrayal or being taken for granted.
I am not a powerful official that can affect policy that affects the community, but I can treat others with kindness and compassion as often as opportunity allows. It’s not transactional or based on who deserves it, but simply recognizing everyone else also lives in a world that sometimes hurl airplanes at them without cause or reason. (Or, to point at a more recent example, a global epidemic to which our response programs were unprepared.)
Exactly, as you and some others mentioned in the thread, we need to be concentrating on what we can do rather than worrying about the things that are out of our control. Glad that you are in better position now and choosing the path of kindness. To be frank at times I feel all this world need is more kind souls.
Music, poetry, booze.
Honestly, I think we have it a lot easier than the theists in that regard. If someone dings my car, I find that my dog has cancer, or I lose my job, I don’t have to address the problem of evil. I don’t need to figure out how to square the idea of an omnipotent and omnibenevolent god with misfortune. I don’t need to wonder if I am being punished or tested, and I don’t have to worry about prayers that aren’t being answered.
There are multiple non-theistic philosophies and religions that offer a framework for understanding and coping with negative events. Neither Buddhism nor Taoism have an explicit dependency on anything supernatural, especially in the schools and forms most popular in the West. The general idea is that we need to be less attached to certain outcomes and that our suffering arises more from our wanting the world to be how it isn’t.
There’s also a large number of non-theistic schools in Western philosophy that have taken their own various approaches to questions ranging from the meaning of life and the meaning of suffering to how to identify and pursue the good. There’s multiple schools of existentialism, of course, but I would even think that writings on the nature of justice (eg John Rawls, Michael Sandel, Peter Singer), the nature of the ego and human experience (eg Thomas Metzinger), and even works of film and literature can help approach an understanding, which is itself perhaps the best coping mechanism.
Don’t rule out Nietzsche either, with his ideas on the creation of your moral system, becoming a “god” unto yourself, exercising will through art, and will-to-power by helping others (and thus altering their lives and will in a much more effective way than harming them as a “show of force” / what most think of as power). I highly recommend studying his thinking very deeply when anyone abandons the idea of god. And remember, even though god is dead, in thus spoke Zarathustra the character (representing one of us, who knows that god is dead) never told that to the monk, but rather envied his ability to believe. Believing in a god is by far better than taking that responsibility on yourself, but for us, it is no longer possible. We ought to envy that kind of belief.
But at the same time, any dogma that harms us or others (Christo-fascism, all forms of theocracy, etc.) is objectively bad except to those in charge of it. Which is no one except one who “speaks for god,” and protestant Christianity has abandoned such a figure and taken on a life of its’ own. It helps no one, not even a person in power, and thus should be abolished.
But as I said, I envy those who hold other beliefs. For now we must take the responsibilities of god onto our own shoulders.
I think the idea of being envious of religious people is grounded in two fundamental errors. First, it is attributing a level of solace to religiosity that is rarely, if ever, achieved in practice. Yes, you can find religious people who are content, but the same applies to Zen monks who have no god but do have a grounding in a framework that explains the world and their role in it. As the Buddhists point out (if we can take that path), discontent and suffering comes from wanting the world to be different than it is. Whether one subscribes to a Buddhist philosophy or thinks everything is in God’s hands and is therefore all for the best, the key is accepting what happens. Or in the Taoist saying “Sitting quietly, doing nothing. Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.” My point here is that it’s absolutely not religion that’s responsible for that, but rather a philosophical point of view that can also be arrived at via non-theistic justifications. I’d argue it’s even easier without the god part, since you don’t have to rectify with the problem of evil. If an all-powerful and loving god gave your newborn child a fatal disease, that’s a lot to have to figure out. That’s where you get all of those ridiculous, stomach-turning platitudes. If your child developed cancer because biology is kind of stupid (and I’m saying that as a biologist), it is still a cause of sadness and mourning, but there’s no causal party involved.
The second part is that whether you’re reading the lives of the saints, talking to friends, or pouring over the latest Pew survey on religion and life satisfaction, you’re looking at self-reports.
Do a thought experiment. Pick a cult-like religion. It could be Mormonism, adventism, Scientology, or something more like a David Koresh or desert dwelling new age thing. Imagine running through questions about satisfaction and happiness with those members, given they know you’re interviewing them on the basis of the religion they hold and (essentially) whether they’re good people because it’s working for them. Or talk to former members of those cults about how they acted versus how they really felt and what that realization was like.
At the end of the day, we as atheists have fewer reasons for existential dread because once you progress past the theology of a twelve year old, there’s far more problems introduced than answered by religions, and a large percentage of those problems come from the mythological component of their philosophies. I don’t go around trying to pick arguments or disabuse people, and I very, very much get Marx’s point, but I think he under-theorized the social and psychological dimensions and that he could be over-generous.
I’m not a control freak, I know that most things in life are outside my control, and I’m generally fine with it. And when those things outside my control are bad for me, I just… accept them while doing whatever I can to make them less bad?
Two people here mentioned media and booze. For me they’re refreshment; they distract me from the problem that I can’t solve, but they won’t help directly. (Sometimes you do need a refreshment.) Same deal with cooking or talking with my pets.
Breathe, think, breathe, think, repeat. Life goes on until it doesn’t. My sister died last year at 42 years old, she taught music to underprivileged children. The universe gave her a tumour in her brain so there isn’t much you can do in this existence but keep breathing and thinking, until you stop doing both.
You will find beauty and ugliness, happiness and sadness, absorb it all and accept it knowing that as far as we know we are the only piece of the universe that is aware of the universe.
Can you provide an example where science cannot explain a situation, because I can’t honestly think of any.
If you get sick then that’s biology.
If your boiler bursts and your house floods that’s an engineering problem.
If lightning strikes your house and your home burns down then that’s just physics.Just because it sucks doesn’t mean science can’t explain it, and it doesn’t mean that it’s inexplainable.
Ultimately everything is either physics or politics, both of which are very easy to understand at a basic level. Especially politics.
Examples are like losing the loved ones in your life, or someone getting a disease at a young age and not able to live a proper life and so on. You could argue that as per the science that is how life works. Like if you are born you must age and die eventually. Or as per the science you can diagonse the disease and come up with an explanation on how things happens and what lead to it. My why question was more of why this is happening at the first place and absurd randomness of it. Or on philosophical level, I can’t comprehend the meaning of certain events. For example you dont even learn or improve anything from such events. And my original question was not to solve any of this for the entire universe, but how people are dealing with with such situations…
There is no why. The Universe has no inherent purpose or meaning. Nothing happens for any particular intentional reason. There was no plan. There is no plan. It can’t be absurd because absurd implies there is some way things are supposed to be like, but there isn’t a right, just or correct way for things to exists. Things aren’t random though, everything in the universe is intricately interrelated and everything affects everything else at some level on some minuscule way and what ends up happening is the result of a million million years of causal collision of particles and forces interacting.
The nice part of this all is that meaning and purpose can be anything you want it to be. They’re human concepts and thus humans can mold them freely. You only have one life, savor the bittersweet, elate on the joy, for it all will pass. We are just the accumulative force of carbon combining in a futile attempt to stave off entropy, resulting in an data flow that makes the universe experience itself. And that I find to be wonderfully delightful.
Now sit down and eat your breakfast.
Can you provide an example where science cannot explain a situation, because I can’t honestly think of any.
Not OP, but there is some stuff. One big example is qualia. How does matter give rise to actual feelings, experiences of things? This isn’t something we can measure directly and it actually seems like it won’t be something we ever can measure. Might also be able to use something like “what was there before the big bang?” and that kind of thing.
Of course, the fact that science can’t explain something doesn’t really justify falling back on magic as an explanation though. Some stuff just may not have an answer.
you see johnny, your mum dying is actually just a demonstration of biology, quite marvelous. and your sadness is actually just psychology. isnt science wonderful
Yeah. Science isn’t another religion. It’s just the universe existing. Sometimes crap stuff happens, that doesn’t mean atheism is invalid just because it would be nice if something else existed. Wanting it doesn’t make it exist, sorry.
“It is what it is.”
This + the occasional LAN party with the boys has gotten me through just about anything
At the sametime I also acknowlede that there are some gray areas where science can’t provide a logical explanation so as to why this is happening to some of the life events.
What do you mean? Why does that matter, what would that explanation do for you?
So to atheists of lemmy, how do you cope up with shits that happens in your life that you can’t explain logically and you really don’t have much control?
I can explain most things logically, that is not the problem. The problem is that the logical explanation still usually sucks. Being religious would only provide an explanation - that can’t really be true, let alone helpful. Presumably I’d rationalize everything with how an infinitely loving, powerful and all-knowing God needed me to have a shit time, for reasons, because that makes a lot of sense. That belief wouldn’t change much, other than potentially leading me to make profoundly irrational choices. I can manage that perfectly fine on my own, thanks all the same.
