Introduction

A life without god? During advent? Well, I have not specifically chosen this time of the year to start my online meandering about an atheistic lifestyle, but it is something I have thought about for a while and now I finally decided to do something with the idea, to act upon it and put it out into the world.

The idea is (in a nutshell) to have a closer look at religion, how it influences our life, atheist or not, and then find out how to minimize that influence without doing harm to the environment we live in.

That is to say, to live without some of the traditions and values passed down to us by various religions (whichever you chose or was chosen for you) yet to still have the same, and living a good life. Good in the sense of being an honest, sincere, sociable person. In other words: the things that society expects us to be regardless of religious dogma.

That is not to say: categorically throw out all moral dogma because it stems from religion. You can be an atheist and still live by the ten commandments, or do charitable things. I think a lot of this blog will be about ethics because it is one of the few useful things given to us by religions. So living without religion means to define your own ethics, or at least find them someplace else.

This blog is not to begrudge anyone from their spirituality. Anyone has, at least in my opinion, the right to choose their own world view, that being a religious one or not is none of my concern. If you are reading this and you are a christian or a Muslim, then do not see this is as anything near an attempt to convert you or rob you of your religion. You may feel insulted or upset because the world view described here does not comply with your own, or even contradicts it. Please don't send me a bomb, but go within yourself and think about why this upsets or insults you.
Just to make this clear: none of what is and/or will be written here is meant to insult or upset anybody. But to some people even the hint of Allah not being so great or Jesus being a fairytale figure may be insulting. If this is stuff you cannot read without your feelings getting mixed up, navigate away from this page now.

If, however, you are an atheist, agnostic or open-minded believer, please read on. I hope you will find some inspiration and ideas. And please comment on my postings, so we can get some pro and cons.

PS: I wanted the url of this blog to be lifewithoutgod.blogspot.com but somebody already has a blog there which is not at all about a life without god. Then I momentarily thought about livewithoutgod.blogspot.com but didn't like the imperative nature of it. lifeaftergod.blogspot.com was another idea but it doesn't fully encompass what I want to say here. So it became Alifewithoutgod.blogspot.com

PPS: The subtitle of this blog is "and other random thoughts". What I mean by that is that I may sometimes throw in some interesting facts, ideas, poetry or whatever "food for thought" I seem fit for this blog but which is not directly related to the above.