Name: How Do You Avoid Nihilism After You Leave Religion?
Uploaded: 2024-07-01T00:45:49.000Z
Duration: 5 min
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If there's truly no God or the specific God concept that I was raised to believe in, now what?

If there's no grounded meaning or morality, how do you exist?

So often the focus of this channel is talking about having a mind shift.

That shift is shifting away from that with which we were indoctrinated towards.

Shifting away from that which we accepted without good reason.

And often that looks like the deconstruction and deconversion of our childhood religions.

Primarily what I have focused on on this channel is the deconversion of Christianity, where I put forward case after case after case for why we can know that this God is not real and why this religion is actually harmful or potentially harmful.

And thus our responsibility to wake up, to have actual good evidence and reason to believe if we are going to, and if we cannot come up with those things, have the courage and the open-mindedness and the discipline to leave those things behind.

And so today I want to try to answer a lot of those questions that get posed to me all the time.

I understand the hopelessness or despair.

I understand the loss and lack of community.

But for as negative as all of those things can sound and can be, I believe there is more than a silver lining.

I believe there is real opportunity, true freedom, and beauty that comes right alongside accepting the truth wherever it may lead.

And I want to talk first about what I hear most, and that is this incorrect association with atheism and nihilism.

Nietzsche is someone who is good to bring up here because Nietzsche defines passive nihilism as this bad thing.

If it is causing you to just lie in bed and let the world pass you by and believe that you shouldn't do anything or care about anything if there isn't some objective morality or meaning, he views that as a negative, which is hilarious because so many people, when they think of nihilism, they think of Nietzsche.

Nietzsche saw the collapse of traditional religious and moral frameworks.

As people begin to collectively lose their belief in this particular god and creator, a lot of his critique was on Christianity, there is going to be a byproduct of that, or multiple byproducts of that, one of them being this passive nihilism.

Nietzsche has this idea of the will to power.

In its core is an affirmation of life, of accepting the challenge of redefining value, to embrace the uncertainty and the struggle as opportunities for increasing yourself, becoming greater, actualizing.

He viewed the decline of these traditional moral concepts based off of their religious connotations as something beneficial.

We get to re-evaluate on a case-by-case, issue-by-issue basis.

As soon as I left God behind and my particular religion, I had to ask myself, why do I believe what I believe now?

You become a blank slate, and that's terrifying, but again, that's freedom.

The very fact that we get to define meaning gave meaning.

I think that it's still going to be subjective and we have to understand that, but that doesn't mean we haven't been able to pull together as cultures and societies to define things that are beneficial versus less beneficial and do our best to help generate that benefit for as many people as possible.

There's no perfect system, and if you think Christianity had all the answers, we're going to cover that in just a minute, why it's okay to let go of Christianity, that it's not all it was cracked up to be, and this could be said for pretty much any religion.

Long story short, Nietzsche saw nihilism as this segue, this necessary temporary condition that occurred when one lost what was their previous grounding, and that it would be up to us to make that transition away as religion fell.

There was going to be kind of this dip and then hopefully this revival, if you will, and I found it to be true for myself that just because when you leave something it's hard or even makes things worse, it doesn't mean you were wrong to leave it.

It doesn't mean the thing you were leaving was good, beneficial, or true, and it doesn't mean that things can't get better because of it.

I think this is true in almost every aspect of life.

You can see that as you start to expand your awareness and perspectives of how other people have thought about this and the fact that other people have thought about this, that other people have dealt with this, it can A. give you some comfort, B. maybe teach you something.

 Whether you agree with it or not, you're at least starting to figure out who you are, and C. can hopefully make you feel less hopeless because there's action here.