I'm not an atheist nor am I intellectually superior.

I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.

I empathise with that stance quite a lot. I think people's perceptions of "god" or whatever name we want to assign to the universal essence, is quite a way off the mark. IMO we need to shed this notion of a singular person (aging face white beard etc) and instead think more along the lines of a single universal energy, a quintessence that is everywhere, and in everything. I don't mean that in any mystical or magical sense. I simply mean that in terms of Nature, if you were to take any single thing, anything at all, rock, metal, tree, flower, funghi, animal . . . and reduce that thing back to it's most primary material, you would find that everything is made from the same thing.

Think of the universe as a monumental construction of lego but where the lego bricks are so infinitesimally small you can't see them. These bricks contain a life energy, the very thing that makes us what we are. If you were a scientist who could see and work with those bricks, you could make anything you wished. A man, an animal, a plant.

What "god" actually is, I believe, is this universal life energy that is within the universal building blocks. It is the same life energy in everything.

This leads to a new line of thinking and understanding.
If WE are made up of the primary building blocks which contain the universal life energy (god) then in one sense WE ARE GOD ! Or at the least, we are an actual living and breathing part of god. We are God and God is us. We are one and the same. That is why we connect with one another and with all that is around us. That is why the great philosophers like Plato, Socrates etc emphasised that we should:

TEMET NOSCE

Know Thyself

The knowledge of what we really are is profound imo. The knowledge that the "real" us inside is utterly indestructible and immortal, is equally profound and exposes the greatest lie ever told to humankind. The lie that you will die, that what you perceive to be death is the end. That lie is underpinned by fear, by scaremongering which frightens us in our weak minds when we are young and which for many people, goes on to frighten them in adult life.

The lie is there to control you. Religion is the perpetuation of that lie to create a system of control, to make you conform to a set of behaviours, to make you willingly accept the shackles of slavery to work for a bunch of thankless elite who are master manipulators.

This is not an atheistic position. This is a position which recognises "god" but does not recognise god in the way that religion has taught us. A position which is not grounded on fear and scaremongering but which seeks to understand Nature around us and how everything is built and made.

We are all one. To fight each other is for the left hand to fight the right hand, utterly pointless. We are the same thing. We have been fooled and hoodwinked by cruel masters who revel in power and greed. Resist the lie and it will flee from you. You can not die.

There is NO after life because there is no "after" as such, there is only the continual NOW. You are, and you have always been, since the beginning of time. You just have no memory in your current form of the passage of the time that has gone before. We were likely all part of a star billions of years ago, still the same universal life energy in a different form, now we find ourselves in our current human form which sadly restricts our memory of the past.

We have nothing to fear.

"I am the Alpha and the Omega--the beginning and the end," says the Lord God. "I am the one who is, who always was, and who is still to come--the Almighty One."

We are made in god's image which is not to say we are clones dropping off a production conveyor belt, but rather that we are a true image/reflection of "god" because we are made of that same universal life energy.

The Bible contains many truths but our understanding and interpretation of them is skewed because of the religious doctrine drummed into us from youth. As I have said in other threads, Genesis is all about the alchemical process whereby you deconstruct a substance into its primary material to reveal those universal building blocks, and then reassemble them into something perfect. For years I never saw or understood this, and were it not for the kindness of others, I would still be ignorant today taking Genesis as the literal creation of the world. I am still largely ignorant, but the seeds of knowledge have been planted and the shoots are straining to reach the light.

For once you and I agree Realist ..............except that you make it sound mystical whereas I simply say that 'Mother Nature and the Laws of physics' are my God and we are a long way off of understanding them.

The Bible contains some sensible stuff but most of it is fanciful garbage, imo!

When you are dead that`s it. It`s what you do in life that counts.

Think the topic starter is dying or even might be dead .

Hope she found happiness with her brother in Texas.

These things may not be meant for mortal man to know absolute.