The thought of God actually might promote self absorption and a shallower emotional experience of what we’ve termed love ❤️

Having embraced atheism and gradually given less credit to “God” over the years and give now currently none, I’ve noticed that although I absolutely realize I’m not God, ironically, have begun to feel sorry for others and for myself which has been emotionally healing to say the least. I reduce everything down biologically which does shape how I perceive inherent meaning, however I love the word love and experience it more now that I’m atheist. I’m writing this because I think I can help readers, some readers, experience the feeling of love for themselves and for others on a deeper level. I won’t make this a long post partly because I’m lazy partly because it’s challenging to do so, but I will suggest that there is a difference between perceiving yourself or someone else objectively versus subjectively and even that doesn’t totally make sense, but maybe I can clarify. Again, I will keep this short because I feel challenged to articulate it, but I can relate to experiences without providing much more detail, but for what it’s worth I once saw my mom who unfortunately had been the recipient of verbal abuse for years, as a vulnerable woman, not just my mom. It was the first time I began to feel a deeper love for her because I abandoned my notion that she is my mom under God, and rather saw her objectively as a woman who had been abused. In all fairness to my dad, who is a wonderful guy, he worked hard and their relationship often was antagonistic, so I don’t wanna blame him, and I don’t believe he was aware, necessarily that the yelling was abusive both to me and my mom, and he was antagonized often but I did feel sorry for her also because she was living in Minnesota and grew up in New York. I don’t think I conceived of all these details but they were in my subconscious probably. It’s just weird that I had never felt love like that before and I remember it clearly and it’s what I term loving reference now. I don’t know if that’s clear or even very meaningful. It is to me but the other thing I wanted to talk about was I lived and taught high school biology in New York City and I lived in Manhattan and I sat down in my old recliner chair one evening and right before I turned the TV on I leaned back with a microwave meal and I saw my reflection in the TV. And to this day, I still cry every time I think about seeing that reflection because the same phenomenon occurred mentally which I include emotional and thought in the word mentally and I realize that’s bad grammar I’ve forgotten how to write and never did write that well. But yeah, I felt an immense sense of love, but also I felt sorry for that guy in the reflection for all the reasons probably buried in my subconscious, but I feel like rather than seeing him under the notion of there is a God I was in an atheist head and saw the image objectively and rightly felt sorry for that guy. I don’t want to get into why I felt sorry for that guy, but there was plenty to feel sorry about and frankly I feel sorry for a lot of people and humanity at large, because obviously I don’t believe in eternal life and life is actually pretty neat and we all experience what we’ve termed emotions which makes the perceptual experience more interesting and more intense. The thought of death is sad, and the consideration of the struggle to survive is tiring and sad. I believe atheism has caused me to become a more compassionate and humanistic person. Now I realize I was raised in this world, which is God oriented and was even baptized and confirmed in a Lutheran Church in a small town in southern Minnesota. So how can someone really make valid conclusions regarding perception so to speak having experienced a life under the notion of God? I realize this and will continue to kind of grapple with this in my mind. I enjoy thinking about how the brain produces thoughts and feelings, which I will remind you are not independent. I don’t know this for sure but I did study neuroscience, and I’m can picture neurotransmission throughout the brain and body and believe it. It’s all always firing according to different proportions, but I know we label and construct other ways to simplify our understanding, but our language definitely comes up short. I guess that’s another topic I will not get into but thanks for reading.