Ask an atheist

My mother, father, sister, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins (obviously). Beyond that I have probably four or five very close friends (not all in the same group) who I would consider family. My dad's side of my "blood" family is closer to family than my moms side (they were extremely dysfunctional) There are some members of that branch that I would not consider family.

I judge family by love, not relation.

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"We can easily forgive a child that is afraid of the dark, the real tragedy is when people are afraid of the light"
-Plato

Where do you find spirituality?

Music

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"We can easily forgive a child that is afraid of the dark, the real tragedy is when people are afraid of the light"
-Plato

.. why does an athiest need/find/make use of spirituality..

perhaps I'm doing something wrong, but I'm pretty sure I'd be more agnostic if I had any sense of spirituality.. maybe I use a different definition of spirituality than most..

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Spirituality is that feeling you get when taking part in a "spiritual" experience, church/ritual, whatever. When I was a Pagan, I participated in rituals that gave me a "spiritual" thrill, but I've never been a real avid music-listener until recently. When I acknowledged my atheism, I stopped doing rituals on such a regular basis, I definitely felt empty where that feeling used to be. I still participate in some rituals at my UU church (we have a samhain festival every year and some other ones if we can organize it) and they still give me a spiritual experience because I let myself get ensnared by the feel of it, let myself experience the buzz of "power" and let myself forget that it's all just nuerons firing in my temporal lobe.

But one activity a year isn't really enough to sustain one "spiritually" there was a little build up of stress (for me anyway) because I didn't have an outlet. But then I moved to New Zealand for an exchange program and became completely seperated from my church. My sister had bought be an ipod for my trip and I loaded up some bands that I had heard on the radio, there were some songs that I hadn't expirienced yet on the ipod, some really good songs.

Remember, I didn't really listen to music that much before coming over to New Zealand, so when I started to, it was like someone eating sugar for the first time. I found that if I lay down with the lights off, just like I was meditating, with the ipod set for some of my favorite songs, I could get the most amazing expiriences, ten times better than anything I had gotten from religion, and just as, if not more fufilling spiritually.

Understand, I don't believe in a soul or spirit. Spirituality is just a word for me to describe what other people attribute to something on a deeper level. But studies have shown that a healthy "spirituality" is important for general wellbeing (not for some people, but for most). I find that music is the best way to fufill that piece of me while still remaining true to reason.

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"We can easily forgive a child that is afraid of the dark, the real tragedy is when people are afraid of the light"
-Plato

ooh...
So... how do you like Kiwiland? hehe... and just as you're about to experience your first ever Christmas at summertime, I'm about to experience my first Christmas in wintertime... hmm... btw I'm an Aussie in Pommy kingdom...

How do you like your fush and chups? And what about the accent when they say "six" hehe... sorry... then there are all the sheep jokes, but err... I won't go into that here...

But I must say, you definitely picked a brilliant country for the music and scenery... Have you heard those islanders sing... boy are they good... (and btw when I say islanders I mean like Samoa, Tonga, Cook Islands, etc and so forth, the Mouri's are pretty good too)...

And if you were wanting people to ask questions here they are:
1. Why did you choose to go to NZ? (not that I'm complaining about your choice, but being biased I woulda said Oz was a much better choice... hehe)

2. Why are you wanting Christians to ask you questions?

1) I didn't choose NZ so much as end up there. Quite honestly I'm not very good at foreign languages, I dropped out of Spanish and only know "thank you" in pretty much every other European language, plus I decided to try and get back in time for university, so pretty much any country that started school at the same time as the US was out because at the point that I decided to go on exchange it was too late to get on them for the next year, and the year after I would have been too old (I only just barely made the cutoff age for NZ). Had I not been given those time restraints I probably would have taken the language plunge and gone to Norway, but that was not the case.
So, english speaking places that start school at different times pretty much narrowed it down to Australia and NZ. I origionally chose Australia, but you guys cancel your program almost every year because your only allowed to take in as many students as you send out, so I ended up in NZ.
After that NZ decided that it was cutting back on english speaking students, and since I take medication, decided to use that as an excuse to cull me out of the program. At that point my only other choice was Malaysia, and as much as I'm sure it's a beautiful place to visit, I really didn't want to live there for a year, so I called the exchange program up and figured out what hoops I had to jump through to end up in NZ. After 3 letters from my psychiatrist and a lot of interviews, I managed to get my application through two hours before the deadline, and here I am.

2. Because a) there are a lot of misunderstandings about atheists that I would like to give people the opprotunity to clear up. And b) because I'm bored.

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"We can easily forgive a child that is afraid of the dark, the real tragedy is when people are afraid of the light"
-Plato