alt Hacker NewsI mean I found great relief from high-demand Evangelicalism via giving up on my belief and seeking intense therapy from the traumas I experienced. However, as both I, my wife, and our kids age, we feel a need for some framework to live by, to some extent.
The friction for me is I am just a very logical and evidence-driven person by nature, so while I recognize (at least for me) that there are some benefits to adhering to some religion or spirituality, the core Christian belief is really difficult for me and always has been. So I don't really know yet where I'll land.
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Why do you need to adhere to religion or spirituality in order to establish a framework to live by? Many atheists and agnostics find great meaning and moral guidance from frameworks that at no point involve religion or spirituality.
I'm also a very logical and evidence-driven person by nature who has gone through similar since losing my faith. It's not for everybody, but I've gotten a lot of enjoyment from Stoicism. There are tons and tons of books on the subject that vary in quality, and unfortunately I can't recommend any specific ones because at this point I've read so much of them that I don't remember where certain ideas came from, but I definitely recommend the writings of Seneca. Marcus Aurelius' writings are great too.
Have you considered reading philosophy? The search of an ethics framework is pretty much one of the core topics.
In the same boat here: 20+ years of hard core Christianity (Scottish Presbyterianism). Heavy, very heavy indeed studies lasting years and years. Regulative principle of worship, this kind of direction.
Was raised kinda an atheist though and converted in my 30s. A willful, well thought out decision to convert.
All came crashing down on me the moment I stopped ignoring some very obvious questions, e.g. who died on the cross?
Even some casual thinking about this lands you, inescapably, on the only conclusion you have available if you stick to the orthodoxy, and that is: a human nature died on the cross. Not God (cannot die) and, unfortunately for Christianity, not a human either (briefly: if JC is one person / two natures, you have to conclude his (human) nature died on the cross since JC the person, being God, cannot die).
At any rate, this is where it started for me and quickly escalated further. The entire New Testament, I'm convinced now, is a fraud and whoever pulled it off didn't even try to hide it. It's incredible how we can bullshit ourselves into believing what we (for whatever reason) want to believe. And not just religion.
In the end, the NT had to go leaving me with the Hebrew scriptures.