Excuse my poor typing and rambling before I begin, I'm not very well.
I was a thoroughly conventional Protestant (C of E brand) until I read Tolkien and started exploring some of the wonderful stories and ideas that I had heard more deeply, especially exploring what those who came before me believed, and what those who were in other parts of our world believed.
I'm not that way nowadays, but nor am I a fully paid up Atheist. I can't remeber who said that Atheism was a 'broad, breezy highway' - might have been Russell? But anyway, I didn't find it to be so. Experience has shaped me.
I have experienced that moment of death, and I can say now that the one emotion I felt in that split second was utter disappointment. I can't forget that. It left me knowing that whatever happens, even if there is life after death, it's nothing like what we have been blessed with
right now. This is our only chance for any kind of happiness in the way we see it now. Any other kind of happiness is unknowable. If there's a god, it wouldn't want us to waste that mad chance that we have been given to be alive - and the chance that we came to be is a chance in a million anyway.
But there is no way I can accept the concept of either Hell or the Devil as a place or a supernatural being. Hell is here now, it's being bullied, being robbed. The Devil is also something here, it's that thing which gets into people just like you or me which makes us tut at people in queues, shout at kids, etc. Or worse. Hell and the Devil are just us. God is in the best we can be, no matter what our religion is, or even if we don't have one. If there is god, then it will accept everyone no matter if they reject it. And I'm deliberately not saying He because that sticks in my throat - as a woman I find it ridiculous that god is He, especially as women are the ones who go thorugh all the pain to prodcue the human race.
That is one reason I reject any conventional form of religion, another is that it also exhorts me to reject science and I find theoretical physics to be truly transcendent. But the main one is why should I accept what other humans have written as the Truth?
I'm truly universalist (and I also deeply respect anyone who has a religion - I see the individual's religion as deeply personal and will only criticise it where it impinges on the good of other people) and I find that sense of the Universal in Tolkien's work more than anything else. I do find god in his work, a sense of limitless possibility and a sense of awe, but not one kind of god, one brand.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Mithalwen
I used to feel sad when I finally came to the conclusion that this was all there is but I did an astronomy course and all the particals that make us will return eventually to the stars whence they came ... so I am content with cosmic recycling
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And that's what gets me too. The concepts of physics amaze and astound me, the idea that we are in the second age of the five ages of the universe, that really we are indestructible... What's really depressing is when people are unwilling to consider all of that, either because they can't be bothered or are afraid of it. That to me is a really miserable existence. Godless even.