I guess I am just trying to understand atheists, so I can understand my brother more and learn. I do want people trying to convert me as I am very fragile and I am finally making progress for myself and my brothers. My life finally has purpose. I think what I need to do is just some books on evolution and atheism and go from there.
Understandable. You've obviously suffered and found something that works for you. Good for you.
For me, while I didn't suffer like this I grew up in a stable, fairly functional family who was not overly religious. I was raised middle-of-the road Methodist in central U.S. But I suffer from OCD (have all my life) and I was pretty dang sure that while I didn't like the idea of the strict task-master God of the Evangelicals, that if God did exist he wanted specific things and wanted them his way.
To that end I lived in constant fear of hell and damnation. Not an easy thing. No amount of assurance that Jesus loved me, I knew there was something I had to do to get it right. NOT because I wanted to go to Heaven so much as I wanted to avoid hell.
And all I had to do was love Jesus with all my heart and soul. That's it!
But like an absentee landlord I never "felt" Jesus, never really felt like I could love a concept that didn't have any reality to me whatsoever. Sure I had good days and felt love for my girlfriend and thought "Hmm, maybe this is what God is. Maybe the bumperstickers are right! God is love!" But then I realized it was love for my girlfriend I was feeling.
The more I started to investigate my "faith" the more I realized it was a tiny corner in a vast universe of competing "ideas", many of which were mutually exclusive.
After about 35 years, thinking almost non-stop about religion, reading the Bible cover to cover (sans apocrypha), surviving a 6 month period in undergrad where I came very close to suicide and never once felt God's reassuring hand on my shoulder (except as a reminder that in some religions suicide means a one-way ticket to hell--and even that experience didn't destroy my faith, it was 20 years later that I looked at atheism). Finally I deconverted.
It was the most liberating feeling I've felt in a long time. It works for me. But it doesn't require that I take on any new, unsupportable ideas, but rather jettison those ideas that not only didn't do me any good, but in some cases actually made my life a living misery.
I would never want anyone to become an atheist based on what I say. I like discussing religion, but if anyone listens to me without questioning it then I'm sad. I'm a fool, just like everyone else. Personally I like atheism, it makes my life livable.
I'm still a "moral" person, I work with a campaign to get equal access to healthcare in California, I donate to charities (secular, when possible), I try to be a good husband, and I stop at all traffic lights.
Personally I believe that religion never stopped someone from committing an evil they really wanted to commit and atheism never kept someone from doing a good deed, and of course, vice-versa.
All of this being said, evolution and old-earth geology played not one WHIT in the decision. It was a non-entity in my thought process.
Science, however, helped me gain a handle on how to process the INFORMATION around me. It taught me to question and be a better skeptic. In that end it is a TOOL for living, not a hammer for destroying religion for me.
I doubt that your brother who is angry is angry because he's an atheist. He obviously suffered as you did, this is his response to a seemingly uncaring world. That's what humanism is for. We need to realize that it isn't God who reaches in to help the beaten by the side of the road, but the samaritan HUMAN who walks by.
Hope that explains just one atheist's veiwpoint.
, her willingness to be corrected and her desire to learn really makes her someone special.
