I'm pretty sure I addressed this somewhat when i discussed understanding the times, but I feel like I really need to hammer this home. Secular humanism is a significant contributing factor to my own political ideology, and this has not changed even as I become a believer again. Why? Because the underlying worldview is right. And just because the answer on this one question might differ from secularists, I'm still very much into that culture. Let me explain why.
Discussing "agnostic atheism"
Most self described atheists are so called "weak atheists" or "agnostic atheists". What separates them from strong atheists or gnostic ones? The degree to which they profess their disbelief. Agnostic atheists think no god exists, but they're open to evidence if it presents itself. Gnostic atheists KNOW no god exists, and gnostic atheism is actually a very tenuous and questionable claim to hold. Can you PROVE god doesn't exist? Of course not. It's like proving russell's teapot doesn't exist. So an intellectually honest atheist is gonna be skeptical of the claim of a god, but they're not gonna claim to KNOW.
Some agnostic atheists are more firm than others on the matter. On the "dawkins scale", that likert scale of belief vs nonbelief, many atheists would call themselves a 6.9 to be honest, professing just short of an actual gnostic disbelief in god. I was a bit softer and more in line with a 5.5 or so. I considered the possibility to always be out there, I just didn't believe because I wasnt convinced of the evidence for god. Going through the cosmology of the big bang, what came "before", etc. I considered a slight probability of god existing. I mean there COULD be an unmoved mover. But there could also be any other number of explanations. I would say I was about 85% sure there was no god, and about 99.9999% sure christianity wasn't real. Why so firm on one, but not the other?
Because Christianity, or any religious claim, isn't just a claim of any god existing, but a claim of a specific iteration of god existing, and a claim that a specific worldview is true. So you're not just talking one claim (god exists), you're talking multiple (god exists + this specific version of god exists + god did this this this and that, and expects this this this and that). I could safely exclude christianity as true, but all gods? No.
And this is important for my worldview. If you change one belief on god, does that do much to change all of my underlying beliefs? No. If you manage to convince me an entire worldview is true, that IS gonna make more of a difference. And that is, in effect, the short answer to this question. But I do want to go into this in more detail.
How can we know god is real?
There are two ways for a god to prove themselves to humans. Either a scientific investigation could prove god to people, or god could prove himself to people or groups of people via revelation. A scientific proof of god would have life changing consequences for the world. It would change our entire worldview, and cause us to behave quite differently than we do. Which is precisely why, I would argue, that such proof doesn't exist.
What if God wants to remain hidden as to not radically change how we live on this planet and influence our decision making, essentially adopting their version of star trek's prime directive, but they want to prove themselves on a more personal level to specific people? Well, you go with personal revelation.
What kinds of revelation exist? Well, if science is out, we can talk visions, stuff like that. We can talk miracles. Something that might not meet the criteria to prove to the masses that such a being can explicitly exist, but might prove stuff to individuals.
With me, it was a certain "miracle" or test that did it. When I left my faith, there was a personal issue that greatly influenced me to lose faith in god in the first place, and I needed proof that they were real and involved with it. And then I came across evidence that, shall we say, confirmed my worst fears on the situation. And this is important for me. I'm scientifically minded. You needed to do something really improbable for me to consider this as a legit "miracle." In science, we kind of have the "null hypotheisis" that has to be disproven before we can consider other explanations. How do you disprove it? by something happening that is sufficiently unlikely to make people consider alternative explanations. At some point, it's more reasonable to believe that there is actually something happening that isn't the result of chance, than to just appeal to chance.
There's even a large discussion in science about this. There's type I errors, where people erroneously reject the null hypothesis, and there's type II errors in which people accept the null hypothesis even when the corrleation they're testing for is true. It is possible to err on both sides, and sometimes we don't know for sure. Here, it's good to appeal to the methodology. If the methodology is sound, and we come to a certain conclusion with a certain level of confidence, it's fine to, until proven otherwise, accept that conclusion. Could you be wrong? Sure. But what matters is if you were wrong for the right reasons.
I'd argue most atheists are dogmatically too far in the type II error direction. Even if a god is real, most are too hard headed to accept it because their worldview doesnt even allow for the possibility. They'll just write off, even insane probabilities, as the law of large numbers or stuff, because their dedication to materialism and naturalism trumps all else and they're reflexively opposed to the possibility of the super natural.
With me, I was a little open minded. And I had hard standards to meet. Trust me, meeting that one standard on a personal level was a virtual impossibility for me, but it somehow happened, and it really fudges with my head. And after that, I did have to reject the null hypothesis on this.
Impacts on my worldview
Now, here's the thing. Does god being real necessarily change ANYTHING? Not in and of itself. My methodology was sound. I'm literally just an atheist who inadvertantly proved god on a deeply personal level and nothing else. And in and of itself, the impacts on my worldview aren't gonna change a metric crapton.
Even more so what I inevitably deduced from the interaction and what I figured out about god.
So what DO I believe?
Long story short, we're souls, we come here. We live. We die. We go to heaven when we die. I mostly believe in a universalist idea of heaven, although I do think there is a kind of realm where some souls get lost between here and heaven in some situations that we can call "hell." It's not fire and brimstone. It can be, however, like walking through a really bad hood at night as a lot of unsavory souls like to hang there. However, in most circumstances, people are guided back to heaven. Those who get stuck there either wanna be there or get lost until they get help. And yeah, some souls dont wanna leave. Or dont realize they're dead. That's why ghosts exist.
Anyway, so what happens when you go to heaven? You get a life review. You basically go over your life, the good and bad. There's no explicit sins, but if you do crappy things, youi're gonna see that, and feel that, and probably judge yourself from it. Apparently the spirits there go relatively easy on you though. I guess if youre REALLY bad and unrepentant something might happen, but idk the specifics.
ANYWAY, then you spend time up in heaven. Doing what? Who knows. Hang out with other souls, discuss previous life times, plan next life times. And yes, most people eventually come back and reincarnation is a thing. I don't know if this is voluntary or not but most stuff I've read on it seems to indicate it is. I've seen conflicting info though. Anyway, there is some link between previous lifetimes and future ones. Like if you were crappy in this life, you might end up getting the same kinds of crap you dished out to others happening to you. So try not to be a jerk. But again, no one is perfect and you're not gonna go to hell for being sinful.
So who is this god we are talking to when we're here? Normally everyone has a spirit guide, maybe multiple, helping them throughout their lives. And that's who we talk to. And that's who did said "miracle" for me. I won't go into specifics there, but I will say my guide is someone who is also quite dear to me in this life. Speaking of which, we also have higher selves. Basically, our entire soul doesn't come to earth, only part of it does, the rest of it chills up in heaven doing heaven stuff. And the higher self this is why my spirit guide can simultaneously be someone I know on earth, while also being up there. Basically their higher self reached out to me, and yeah.
Beyond that, you should know that "god" in general is basically all of us. All souls are part of god. God is like the original personality, and the combination of all souls, if that makes sense. Some spiritual forces call this energy "source", as it's the source of all. And that's what the creator god is.
That's the gist of my spiritual worldview. it's actually quite generic and doesn't say a whole lot. If I said morally what god wants, I guess it's for all of us to get along, and to respect each other, and dont harm each other. ya know, golden rule stuff. There's no specific moral codes, no specific ways of doing things. If anything that's why this world keeps the question shrouded in darkness. God doesn't WANT to publicly reveal themselves, because if they did, it would ruin the experiment, and everyone would just try to act like they think god wants them to act. So in order to preserve free will, they make sure no one knows for sure, and can't prove anything, and the result is...what we see.
My reason for being here
So...despite that, I do have my own reasons for being here, spiritually speaking, so I'm gonna explain a bit of that broadly as well. Okay, so...say you do want to influence humanity, but you want to keep up this act or experiment or charade or whatever you consider this place? Well, you gotta send people in to influence how people think.
But here's the thing. Everyone who comes here has to forget who they really are. While some people do tend to remember stuff from past lives, the world between lives (aka "heaven"), etc, and you can bring this out in people via past life regression and crap sometimes (although that is, in itself controversial and not many people accept that, and for good reason), you're generally not SUPPOSED to remember.
So...that said, they often have people go through a complex life plan to like...smuggle the information in. So we're born, we don't remember anything, and then our lives our guided and chaparoned in certain directions in order to cause certain things to happen to us, to teach us certain things, that we can then use to teach others.
For me, my leaving of christianity seems very much planned. They set up the personal issue i described earlier to basically shake my faith, so that I would lose it, and then spend years learning as an atheist, and rebuilding up my views again, and then they basically were like "surprise! yeah we're real after all."
Why did they do this? Because I got important messages to give to humanity. My entire system of getting rid of work and reforming capitalism is a huge part of that.
The ultimate goal though? Climate change. The other side primarily interferes with this world like this to stop humanity from destroying itself. And it's doing that an awful lot these days. Like, in the previous generation, the whole goal was to stop us from blowing ourselves up with nukes. That is still a concern, but now the big existential threat is climate change. Human activity is cooking the planet. Me being the lazy fricker who wants us to stop working, I want us to engage is less human activity, that creates less climate change. And if we clean up the stuff we are doing with green energy, and then basically stop working ourselves into extinction due to gross misuse/overuse of earth's finite resources, we can maybe avoid killing ourselves as a species. And who knows? Maybe one day we WILL explore the rest of the galaxy. But yeah, we're in a weird moment where this planet's civilization is industrializing, but it has a lot of really harmful ideas that could destroy it long term. Like expecting infinite growth on a finite planet. We are literally working ourselves to death.
So...they sent people like me, not JUST me, there's probably millions of us, but people LIKE me, to try to shift the collective consciousness of the planet to a more sane and less suicidal state.
That's basically what I've figured out.
So...where does that leave humanism?
Humanism is great! There's nothing wrong with humanism. If anything, shifting to humanism and away from more organized religions where people still promote bronze age ways of thinking is good. A lot of those ideas are bad and have outlived their usefulness and should be replaced with other ideas. Enlightenment ideas are good. Democracy is good. Liberalism is good. Not slaving away because we think god is punishing us for eating a piece of fruit is good. Not reproducing our way into malthusian catastrophe (can be largely avoided just by using birth control and letting people make their own choices) is good.
I mean, my humanist perspective is based. It's exactly what this planet needs. So...why should I really change anything about my perspective? There's very little I HAVE to change to accommodate my new spiritual beliefs. If anything my own life path seems to say "yeah this is what you're supposed to believe and advocate for, keep doing that". So if anything, stay the course and trust the plan.
And you know what? Secular humanism as a worldview actually helps me with that. yes, I now believe in a god, but due to how my own spirituality evolved and my understanding of life on this planet, and what happens when we leave this planet, and why I'm here, my humanist perspective is still valid and it's still central to my views.
keep in mind, God, in my worldview, doesn't want to be loudly and publicly worshipped, but wants to remain hidden. They just want to ensure that this this planet doesn't blow itself up with nukes or cooks itself alive with climate change. That's the goal. And my ideology and ideas are just one part of this larger plan.
As such, I'm culturally secular humanist, I believe in "something", but it doesn't just not contradict my ideology, it actually enhances it and furthers my own conviction that what I'm doing is right. And people might not always like what I have to say. Fine, whatever. Listen or don't. I'm here to just tell you guys this crap and then go back to doing whatever I was doing in the afterlife.
And that's how I see it.
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