Going Godless

If you question it, it’s not faith. If you don’t, it’s not truth.
If you are considering going godless, take a moment now to consider why. If you have chosen to become an atheist or agnostic because you are angry with the world or with God, or you are dissatisfied with organized religion, or maybe you would like to live a less restricted lifestyle, these are all the wrong reasons. You need to make peace with whatever you believe God to be. If you chose to become godless because for you, science has yet to provide evidence of a God, or because the religion in which your parents brought you up makes no sense, you may also be making the wrong choice.
To follow a particular religion, or to leave religion behind altogether, is not a rational choice made after considering the pros and cons the way we buy a new car, and it is not a calculated decision made by weighing the odds in the way we might bet on a horse. In fact, going godless is not a choice at all. There is only one reason to go godless. It is because deep down inside, your gut feeling is telling you that the universe is indeed godless. You have no choice. You are already godless. You are what you are. So before you continue, take a moment to search deep inside yourself. Breathe deeply, close your eyes, and relax. If you have the opportunity, try this in a sacred place, such as a church or on a mountaintop. My favorite sacred places are the grand cathedrals of Europe. They are designed to put you in the presence of God. If you cannot feel God in the Frauenkirche in Munich, you will not feel Him anywhere.
Clear your head of all the thoughts of the day and find that place of solitude within you, that place where you would expect to find God. Again, breathe deeply, and relax.
For many people of faith, even flirting with the idea of atheism is threatening and arouses a bit of anxiety. Fear of damnation has a very real impact upon our rational thinking. Try to let these fears pass, and examine what is really going on inside you. Don’t worry; you will be able to safely return to your convictions afterward.
When you reach that quiet place, when you have cleared away all the mental buzz, all the thought-provoked emotion, all the bias and preconceived ideas you have carried with you all your life, ask yourself: do you feel the presence of God?

What do you feel about the existence of God?
You probably have one of three experiences. The first and most commonly professed experience is a feeling that there is a personal God, the one defined by your religious faith, or at least a God you can talk to and receive guidance from. If you fall in this category, that is fine, and you may want to continue reading because you are interested in what goes on in the mind of an atheist. You might find we have a lot more in common than you would think (or care to admit). I am not out to insult you or convert you, but you will have to tolerate my materialist reasoning if you read further, since I have to explain things from the godless viewpoint. I will try my best to capitalize the right pronouns for you.
The second type of experience, also common, is a feeling that logically there must be a god of some sort, but maybe not a personal god described by any religion, and not one whose presence is always felt. There must be a god-like creator, maybe more than one, you reason, but you do not feel that you are in touch with it. Perhaps you do not sense that this deity is particularly concerned about you—it is an impersonal deity, more of a mystical power or a force. Having no obviously divine guidance handed down to you in a concise book, you are living an essentially godless life. For this reason, the content of this book is meant for you. You may not agree with the baseline atheistic assumptions of a given line of reasoning, but the end results are the same: how do we live without reliable, divine guidance?
The last category of experience is that you felt no divine presence, no connection with a god, and that in your heart you feel all of existence is natural and material, having no supernatural component. You may feel that there is simply no way of knowing if God exists, in which case you are agnostic, technically a category of atheism, which encompasses anyone lacking belief in a god. Or you may reason that if there were a supernatural being, i.e., God, it would be obviously evident, either in common miraculous events or in our spiritual contemplation. Since we do not commonly experience miracles (at least firsthand), and because spiritual contemplation can lead to quite a variety of versions of “the one great truth,” one might deduce that there must not be a God, or at least anything we would classify as God, and certainly nothing supernatural. In this case, you are an atheist.
Just so you know where I am coming from, this is me, a “hard” atheist, one who believes there is no God, rather than one lacking belief in God.
If you experience a personal God, while I do not, there are several possible reasons why this could be. The first is that there is a personal God who touches some people, but not others, as the quote from the Quran above suggests. In this case, I must assume I am pre-damned, so to speak. If this is the true nature of God and the universe, then I still have no choice but to navigate my way through a godless life, so I must make the best of it. Along the way, I’ll attempt to help my fellow passengers in the same boat of damnation so that at least we can make better use of our time in this world. Thus the premise for my theme is still valid. Alternatively, there may be a personal God, but he keeps his distance so as not to influence our free will. This concept posits that we are put into this world as a test to see if we are able to find our way back to God. This would seem to imply that God is not omniscient; otherwise, there would be no need to place the rats in the maze if the outcome is already known.
The third possibility is that there is no personal God, yet some people interpret neurological phenomenon in a different way than I do. You may even experience a deep and very believable godly presence. Those who experience the presence of God are not delusional or victims of overactive imaginations. It is perfectly normal. All that we ever experience of reality is that which is reconstructed in our brains.
Additionally, assuming there is no personal God, there is also the possibility that some people are faking it. Some so fear the idea of being an atheist that they will insist they felt something. There are many others who will insist they feel God’s presence because of cultural conditioning, the expectations of society, peer pressure, or simply because they cannot accept the overturning of their worldview. I know you are out there! But don’t feel bad. You are not alone, and it is not a weakness. It is not shameful. I do not expect those who fall into this category to turn away from all the rewards that religion provides, or to have to deal with the problems that professed atheism brings.
I have no way of knowing which possibility is true for the many who profess belief in God, but I do have this to go on: I myself fell into the “faking it” category before I admitted my atheism.
If you believe in God, you will accept the first explanation. For me, it does not really matter which explanation is correct. I have no God to turn to, and so I must go on godlessly.
If you are not already godless, I do not wish to steer you away from your beliefs. My ideas put forth here cannot replace your religion and what you get out of it. But if you are godless, what I hope to do is show you how the lack of religion impacts your life and how to deal with it.