Security: How To Monitor Your Network Connections

Many atheists that I’ve known, including myself, exhibited an interesting
behavior during and after their transition from faith to non-faith. I call
this behavior substitution.

Here’s how it works: the atheist, having spent so much of his life loving
this underlying, structure-giving entity, finds himself in need of something
similar upon becoming a non-believer. It’s as if an emptiness rushes in
where God used to be, and our human fragility require us to fill it.

I find that most young atheists fill this emptiness with other grandiose and
beautiful concepts; here are the main ones:

• Romance: When the atheist places an extremely high value on “true
  love” and generally the whole Romeo and Juliet concept of love being
  more important than anything.

• Nature: An extreme reverence for the beauty and complexity of the
  universe.

• Karma/Buddhism: A fairly direct substitution, but one that
  doesn’t involve a personal God.

• Logic/Reason/Science: Embracing the disciplines that uncovered
  the flaws in religion.

• Order/Justice: A direct substitution for the most needed element
  — structure.

I think Einstein’s was the natural one, as was my own up until my late 20’s.

Mine started as romance, however. I remember thinking that romantic love was
the ultimate thing when I lost God. I had illusions of soul mates and
eternal bindings and such. It’s interesting to look back and realize that I
was simply exchanging one drug for another — with the underlying problem
being the inability to face reality in its true, raw, and rather cold form.

After talking to a young atheist for just a short amount of time, you can
often surmise which type of substitution they’ve made. Which kind are you?