The book "The Atheist's Way; Living Well Without Gods" is all about living a life with meaning. If you've struggled with the apparent meaningless of life without God, this podcast is a great place to start to get on the road to creating meaning.
Get the book at Amazon.com
or at Barnes And Nobel
Rich,
ReplyDeleteI think the term for that is "Christian Nihilism", i.e. the ideology that "apart from God, life is meaningless". When I fell from my New Agey Lefty pseudo-Xtian beliefs (a mercifully brief but embarrassing episode of my life in graduate school--damn Postmodernism *grumble*), I definitely descended into a personally dark nihilism and depression of my own.
What got me back was taking a break from the writing of my MA thesis and going back and reading a lot of "Intro to Western Philosophy" type books, recounting the history of Western thought from the pre-Socratics to the present. It was like performing a full system reboot on a computer...and eventually I was able to rebuild a coherent, secular, humanistic, rational world view.
I also came out of it a much more confident atheist than I had been previously in my teen years, when I was more outraged at religious hypocrisy and the sex-negative views of the religious than anything else.
Although I'm skeptical of anyone who says "I was an atheist, now I'm religious", I guess I did go through that--but only by taking leave utterly of my rational faculties by trying to really wrap my head around Postmodernism...I completely reject PoMo today.
I really enjoyed a work called _Reclaiming the Enlightenment_ by Stephen Eric Bronner, which helped me solidify my views coming out of the messy morass of muddled PoMo thought.
JJR commented: "It was like performing a full system reboot on a computer...and eventually I was able to rebuild a coherent, secular, humanistic, rational world view."
ReplyDeleteI like your analogy. I'm beginning to realize that one does not really start living a coherent life until one is willing to do a system reboot. I think Socrates had a good point: "The unexamined life is not worth living..."