Disclaimers:
1) For anyone who reads this, keep in mind that I'm not saying anything about any particular belief system being true or false; you'll notice that I avoid those words in favor of personal evaluations like "scary" and "disgusting".
As someone who tries to maintain an empirical view of the world, and not one of the old-style hard-boiled "dialectic materialists" still left in some parts of post-Soviet science tradition, I recognize that there can be no definite conclusion as to the truth or falsehood of any claim in the field of religion: we simply don't know enough about unfalsifiable and unobservable stuff involved in spirituality to be
sure whether anything of that sort exists. We can only postulate certain likelihoods for any particular conclusion.
So, basically, the only thing we can use to firmly, honestly decide what's right and wrong to do with spirituality is what we
choose to be right or wrong.
2) Also, my points are not about something being more or less likely. They're more in the realm of psychological consequences that might occur if you take any particular approach to spirituality.
What you believe
doesn't change the world, of course, but it changes the way you
see the world, and that influences what you, personally, do about a given situation.
3) Oh, and one more thing. I didn't really bother to polish the stuff below like I usually do with my posts.
Writing it was like proselytizing, and for me that's like, I dunno, working in a bacon factory if you're Jewish. It's against some of my principles.
But it might be helpful, and you seem to be up against the same dilemma I've barely survived in the past, so here we go...
The first choice is that you could keep to your principles and firmly admit that there's no escape - but while it's the obvious moral high ground in your case and mine, you were right in noticing that few people have the strength to do that when shit really hits the fan.
Also, they're often wrong about there being no escape. Not always - cancer, for instance, is very often lethal - but often.
Just look at people who kill themselves out of desperation and at those who attempt suicide but survive: their problems, seemingly insurmountable from their perspective at the time, usually resolve themselves after a while.
That's most definitely
not evidence of divine intervention, it's just an illustration of how our brains work: we
have a hard time seeing something we don't already believe in, so despair usually muddles our thinking and gets us preferentially perceiving those things that lead to more despair.
There's also another road, a slightly easier one. You could cave in and adopt a religion.
That will appease this little scared part of you that is responsible for people's last-minute conversions: the uncertainty, the doubt, the fear of a bad afterlife if they're right and you don't convert.
If you believe hard enough, it will even help you carry on despite there being no hope - because religions are
built on forcing people to carry on in situations like that.
But I gotta say that you're right about being
afraid of converting. You will
not feel good about it, at least not for a while.
There will still be doubts, hard-to-notice guilt over lying about your "faith" to everyone and to yourself, there will still be uncertainty as to whether you did the right thing by converting.
The one definite benefit it would have is, it would probably force you to keep living until shit
stops hitting the fan.
There will also be moral quandaries and moments of horror as to the usual contradictions you notice about religions: the problem of hell, the problem of evil... there's a lot of stuff that, when you really, honestly look at it, will tell you that you believe in something more horrible than a cessation of existence.
The third approach is that you could
compromise: accept spirituality, but not any particular religion.
You can appease the little scared part of yourself by
faking an escape route like you do with religion; the difference is that
this escape route is of your own devising, and thus doesn't have the components that you would detest in any other form of spirituality.
Of course, it's harder at first than accepting a religion. You'll have to build it up, one little lie after another, with no moral support from other believers since you will be the
only believer.
But - it's still doable.
And it works, in terms of lessening the existential dread and hopelessness that keep you from being level-headed in a really bad situation. Like fanatics and, to a lesser extent, ordinary believers are in the face of death, so will you.
It kinda-sorta combines the benefits of religion with atheism's lack of disadvantages: you get somewhere to retreat in the darkest moments, much like religion, but it doesn't require you to believe in things that you don't
want to believe in.
Why do I even bother saying this? Because making up an afterlife I could genuinely
accept, and then lying to myself until I believed in it, is probably the only thing that got me not to kill myself in my teenage years.
As the continuous shitstorm and subsequent need to retreat lessened, I let go of that belief, slowly at first, then more confidently. I don't believe it anymore. (But I'll probably have to when things turn unbearable again. Blech. I really hate that scared little part of myself sometimes.)
The fact that it helped me carry on living and thinking, but to do so without compromising my principles completely, is the only reason I'm talking about it at all; I frankly don't like it very much, especially the fact that I sound like I'm
proselytizing what's essentially a controlled form of insanity.
I'm not saying it's the best thing in the world.
It's
worse than keeping to your lack of faith; it's still a moral compromise. It's just not as big a compromise as converting to a religion you detest.
Believing in something no one else believes in is also harder to pull off than just going along with the religious crowd.
It's definitely harder than believing in religion if you don't see anything
wrong with that religion.
But it's far easier to do than to twist everything you are and truly believe in religion, if you've already looked at it closely enough and jerked away in horror.
Even if you manage to twist yourself fully, accept that which you despised... would you be truly the same person afterwards? To others, you might seem like a "better" or even "happier" person after you do - but that wouldn't mean genuinely becoming at peace with yourself.
Going religious might increase the chances of survival by reducing the chances of suicide - and don't tell me it's easy not to kill yourself unless you've experienced it yourself - but would such an existence, internally conflicted even if you don't notice the conflicts on a conscious level, count as
life?
The history of Soviet dissidents, some of which underwent something akin to Winston Smith's breakdown in Orwell's 1984, show that their existence was pretty miserable after they have betrayed their firmest beliefs. Food for thought.
And ultimately, that kind of a compromise can make it easier to carry on when there seems to be no way out.
I doubt that after a long enough, you'll
regret carrying on: either you'll be dead, with whatever happens afterwards, or things will turn out to be not so inescapable after all. It's a win-win.
As I've found personally, sometimes compromising your refusal to believe so you can keep living is worth it.
The trick to doing that and still remaining yourself is not to compromise
everything.
Hold on, I'm proselytizing now. Eww, that's disgusting. I'd better stop doing that and get to something I actually believe in doing.
You get my point. Even when your instinctive need to believe gets too strong to bear, there are still other ways than to believe something you don't want to believe.
But - there's a little caveat with my particular solution. A big caveat, actually.
The problem with adopting
any belief system, especially one of your own design, is that there's always
doubt.
It's really hard sometimes, knowing that billions of people believe that scary shit they want you to believe as well, while you're all alone. What if you're wrong, and they're right?
But it's a fear every religious person faces too, unless they're too fanatical to even consider it. What if Muslims are right, and everyone else goes to hell? You'll feel mighty stupid for choosing to be a Christian then. Same if Christians are right and you believe to any other religion, or Hindus, whose beliefs about reincarnation are mind-bogglingly horrifying as well.
That's why I wrote the first part of the post, the one before the update, illustrating why religions are so freaking scary whether you're righteous or not.
It's the key to fighting that doubt: the knowledge that if any one particular religion is right,
everyone is screwed, believers and infidels alike.
That won't make the doubt go away entirely, but it'll make it easier to stand by your initial choice and laugh at all the "fire and brimstone" speeches... even if no one realizes
why you're laughing and explaining the irony would be too much of a bother.
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