So, I made a thread a few months ago about how I feel like I'm a bad person.
I've been an atheist for nearly ten years now, and a lot has happened to make me realize the ethical poverty that is secularism. I'm not saying you need to be religious to be a good person or anything, but pretty much all the atheists I know (including me) are misanthropic and just not pleasant to be around. I've also been the type of atheist who believes the atheism absence philosophy is dire and hollow. The older I got, the more my anti-theism crumbled into a mockery of its former self and by the time I turned 30 I realized how important religion is to people's lives and its value to humanity.
For a long time, I have seeked truth. I've explored various religions and philosophies and nothing ever really stuck. But in the past few months or so I've been desperately missing the faith of my birth: Christianity. For a solid 19 years of my life Christianity was a big part of it and I missed it. Contrary to popular belief, I didn't leave the church because I had a bad experience.
So again, the past few months I've been working on righting my wrongs and trying to become a better person - someone that people would like to be around and is pleasant to talk to. I've been slowly undoing my negative outlook on life and started to open my heart again to the possibility of finding religion again.
Something happened the other day though. You could call it a coincidence but it felt too on the nose to be a coincidence, so after hours and hours of thinking I deduced that it was destiny. Ever since, I've been researching Christianity and trying to find intellectual rebuttals to my atheistic claims and questions. I'm starting to find that they don't really stand to scrutiny. I went to the church yesterday and talked to a priest. I prayed for God to place himself into my heart and that my heart was finally open for him again. I wasn't sure what I believed but I figured that it was worth a shot. If God doesn't exist, then I live my life as I did previously. But if God exists, then I could gain joy and spiritual fulfillment. In the end, it didn't matter and I had nothing to lose. I recall crying tears (joy? sadness?) while I prayed. It felt like something open a salve in my spiritual heart and love just pored through. Today I went to mass and cried twice. Once during a song and once during a prayer. I distinctly remember thinking that no philosophy that I've read could explain that feeling.
Right now I'm standing here not sure if I'm an atheist anymore and will be taking classes to become Catholic starting next month. I have so many questions about God/Jesus and I fully plan on having them answered sufficiently. I still have doubts, misgivings. But the doubts and misgivings don't outweigh the feeling I have when I pray in that chapel.