Post-Atheism: An ex-Mormon’s journey from Christian materialism to material spirituality

Truth does not begin with an answer on behalf of which all questions must constantly rearrange themselves. Truth begins with fearless questions.

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Old: Faith is a fatigue resulting from the attempt to preserve God’s integrity instead of one’s own.

New: Faith is the consequence of knowing that mind is an illusion which nonetheless must take responsibility for that machine whose function it calls, “myself.” It is the expedient interest in a mechanistic life strategy, however inadequate the available information and impossible the rational justification.

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This book takes for granted the atheist’s claim.  Too much of life is wasted looking over one’s shoulder with reasonable arguments while the theist delays our progress, not with reason, but with a defense of inherited presumptions.  I will stop for responsible objections, but not for the simple fact that an objection was posed.  In moving on, perhaps rudely, I am guilty from the theist’s view of taking atheism for granted.  I do not offer a defense but only the explanation that this book was not written with the theist in mind … as I said, I do not care to waste any more time.

I have rejected my inherited belief system and have embraced self-mechanics as the key to my strategy for life.  This book begins here.  If I deal with theism at all in this book, it is an attempt to finger those strings which had determined my former belief and to incorporate this knowledge into my new strategy, but not to refute theism as such.

But I also need to mention early in this book that even the atheist’s cultural war is not my subject matter.  I wish to leave this political task behind, at least for this book, and proceed with the individual task forced upon those of us who have already accepted atheism at some point in our lives as indispensable to life’s journey.  In order to do this, I also draw a sharp line between my expedient need for an individual strategy and the need of the atheist’s herd for unity. In short, as yet another human string, atheism draws me out of the herd of theism.  Atheism is in this sense a necessary point of arrival. It is how and where I stop my inherited cultural inertia. While as an individual, atheism is also my point of departure. It too is a herd I leave behind