Emotional Suppression & Atheism
Sep. 15th, 2004 09:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mishalakI was watching a thing tonight about C.S. Lewis and Freud as a sort of debate on god. I was struck by the emotional suppression of the atheists presented and how many of the religious types were on about this was dangerously unbalanced. Funnily I agree with the religious types and yet I am not religious.
When I was young I admired the perfect rationality of Spock and scientists. Yet I was religious then, because I believed in what I'd been told about miracles. If one accepts the miracles of the church as true there can be no question about belief. But I struggled with my religion as I struggled with being emotional. It took quite some time but I gradually came to realize that suppressing emotions doesn't eliminate them, it causes them to leak out in unconscious ways. At the same time I first realized that I had been lied to about at least some miracles after seeing some holy relics up close. As I grew to first accept my emotions and then to uncomfortably embrace them I also lost my faith first in Catholicism and then in religion in general.
We are not rational beings. Even my choice not to believe has roots equally in irrationality as in rational thought. That's what I find sad about so many atheists. Like the young C.S. Lewis they are angry with god rather than not believing. And they are so often desperately unhappy. I'm often and unhappy person myself, but it isn't because of a lack of god in my life. My unhappiness stems in large part from those years when I suppressed my emotions, perhaps out of an unconscious desire not to admit my homosexual feelings. Trained into this unhealthy shape my emotions leaked out in senseless depression.
Now, having what I hope is a better grip upon my emotional side, I am trying to undo what I did to myself by looking for happiness in whatever I have. That there is no god is not a tragedy. Quite the contrary, it can be a thing of hope and joy. And that's where I think so many atheists go wrong. They really are just angry Christians. Conversely I think the same is true for a fair number of the loudest and most militant of Christians. They are so loud and so angry with people doubting their "God" because they themselves deep down doubt him.
When I was young I admired the perfect rationality of Spock and scientists. Yet I was religious then, because I believed in what I'd been told about miracles. If one accepts the miracles of the church as true there can be no question about belief. But I struggled with my religion as I struggled with being emotional. It took quite some time but I gradually came to realize that suppressing emotions doesn't eliminate them, it causes them to leak out in unconscious ways. At the same time I first realized that I had been lied to about at least some miracles after seeing some holy relics up close. As I grew to first accept my emotions and then to uncomfortably embrace them I also lost my faith first in Catholicism and then in religion in general.
We are not rational beings. Even my choice not to believe has roots equally in irrationality as in rational thought. That's what I find sad about so many atheists. Like the young C.S. Lewis they are angry with god rather than not believing. And they are so often desperately unhappy. I'm often and unhappy person myself, but it isn't because of a lack of god in my life. My unhappiness stems in large part from those years when I suppressed my emotions, perhaps out of an unconscious desire not to admit my homosexual feelings. Trained into this unhealthy shape my emotions leaked out in senseless depression.
Now, having what I hope is a better grip upon my emotional side, I am trying to undo what I did to myself by looking for happiness in whatever I have. That there is no god is not a tragedy. Quite the contrary, it can be a thing of hope and joy. And that's where I think so many atheists go wrong. They really are just angry Christians. Conversely I think the same is true for a fair number of the loudest and most militant of Christians. They are so loud and so angry with people doubting their "God" because they themselves deep down doubt him.