Why Am I Here?

I have been an atheist my entire life.

I still am.

The fact that I am an atheist, however, does not bar me from having a sense of spirituality. I grappled with this thought for a long time. I have had many in life tell me that I could be spiritual without actually being a theist. I usually wrote off such suggestions as pure nonsense.

The past several years of my life have been the hardest. I graduated college and began a grueling and difficult tenure at law school. I entered a very serious depression. I think many factors led to it. Of all the factors that led to depression one stood out:

Was this really it? With law school I began to realize how short and quick life is. Soon I will begin my career. Then my family. I will work. I will die. Is that all? This was difficult to grapple with, but as I sense my own mortality I realized I wanted something more in life. I wanted something beyond the self. Something to make me feel truly human.

That's when I found Asatru.

I was surfing the internet one night, when I came across Asatru. I began reading about it and it intrigued me. The religion of pre-Christian Europeans. As someone who has always had a strong interest in his background and in his history, such a faith was quite intriguing. I began reading more about it, and I became more and more fascinated and attracted to it.

As a reconstructionist religion, I felt I could truly make it my own. Without any monolithic written work, like the Bible, a lot of the practices seemed to be left to the individual. I could practice it as I wished. I could make it my moral code, use it to garner strength and patience with an ever more frustrating and difficult world.

I am still an atheist, however that does not matter too much to me with Asatru. I do not believe the gods exist on some metaphysical plane or manner. But, I do believe they exist as concepts and as ideas. They exist as values. They exist as something that I can internalize and something that I can look up to. That is their value to me, and that is something I have been searching for for many years.

Once finals are over I will truly jump into researching the lore and researching secondary sources. I am looking forward to this, and I am looking forward to the journey that lies ahead.