Those of you reading my site for gaming/computer stuff may want to turn away now. I haven't done this often, but here I go again... Another post about Atheism and such.

Most Atheist writings talk about how Atheism can give one comfort during a crisis, and how the old adage "there are no Atheists in foxholes" just isn't true. And usually, they're right - knowing nothing is "out to get you" or "punishing you," and understanding science and reason really does help you through many crises. But what happens when it doesn't?

Well, recently I've been going through a health crisis in my family. It's (most likely) not life-threatening, but it is fairly serious. The condition does not seem to be responding in the expected way to the scientifically accepted "gold standard" of medical treatment. It'll improve in one area, but stay the same or get a little worse in others. It's pretty frustrating, especially for the person with the condition, but also for me, since of course I want to see the person get better and back to 100% normal life!

Now, if you've read every post here, or know me, you know that for a lot of my earlier life, I did subscribe to many and varied Woo Belief Systems™©. From being raised Christian, then in my adolescence and early adulthood, moving on to various Occult belief systems, I've been around the Woo Block! But, I'm now a devout (and Out!) Atheist. Or so I thought.

Well, one night, a particularly bad one, during a discussion about what to do to move closer to resolving this medical crisis, I ... well ... broke down. I don't know why, it just happened. All of the old thought patterns came back. I started wondering what the heck we'd done to deserve this kind of punishment, what being was messing with us, how we could fix it, and ... yeah. It was, for lack of a better term, an Atheist crisis of faith! How can you have a crisis of faith when you don't believe in anything?

Atheists DO believe in things though. Things that can be proven, things we can see, touch, or fully understand. I think that's the problem in this case. This is a fairly common medical condition that has been studied for many, many decades. It has a very well-defined accepted treatment regimen, and it's supposed to respond and resolve fairly easily. But it isn't. So, I think, I started to wonder if science really was the answer. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Woo isn't Woo. Maybe there are "things out there" fucking with us humans. I think I was starting to see Woo as science, in a way, since I was seeing "evidence" that "science was wrong." It was wrong-thinking, but that's the state I was in at the time.

So what happened? It passed. I realized I was engaging in some bad thinking, wrong logic, and of course, under stress and therefore not thinking logically. I was pretty ashamed at having sunk into that way of thinking at all. I thought I had become a devoted, "devout" Atheist and would never again engage in Woo-think or anything approaching it. I guess, though, that more than 20 years of that sort of belief takes a while to fully leave a person's brain. I envy the Atheists that were raised Atheist, or otherwise were never engaged in a Woo belief system, or those that converted very early. I imagine they don't have to deal with this kind of crisis.

Anyway - hopefully this post will help show that it's not always easy to guard against "wrong" thinking, and sometimes even Atheists question their "faith."

And what about this medical crisis? Well, researching the condition outside of accepted medical circles begins to uncover a lot of "alternative" treatments and the like, some of which are based on what used to be accepted medical science. It is also, though, known that sometimes this condition can simply take a while to respond to the treatment. But anecdotal evidence also shows that some people simply do not respond to the gold standard treatment and require a different medication. Who do you believe? How long do you give the gold standard time to work, when quality of life is fairly negatively affected by the condition? We're simply... not sure, right now. We've got some options for second, third, etc, opinions, and we'll avail ourselves of those options. Full genetic testing has been done on the person with the condition, and we know that said person has some genetic issues with various medications, as well as in the area of pain response and the like, so it does follow that they may respond differently to treatments based on this. Who knows. We'll get through it!

Take care. :)