I’ve always found it easier to accept that the universe is fundamentally random and today is my turn in the barrel than wonder why God did this to me.

Radical acceptance. And then to follow, build a core of self supporting psychology structures to live by, which sounds complex, but it’s just things like

Emotional regulation tools. Distress tolerance. Self support concepts.

Let me know if you want me to expand on anything.

Soon I’ll be dead and then it won’t matter anyway.

For me, the existential struggle is coming to terms with my irrelevance (or our collective irrelevance – our civilization and species has some big challenges ahead in the next couple of centuries). It’s not that it’s a bad time to be a naturalist, but it’s just a bad time to be human and depend on a society that is supposed to continue without end.

That said, I’ve only acclimated to the idea that only oblivion and irrelevance await me. Living day to day is augmented by social and hedonistic comforts: I pet my cat and my dog. I take care of my wife. I play video games and limit how often I look at the world burning up.

We’ve encountered similar tropes in our apocalyptic fiction. Neo learns that his entire life was a dream, a construct in the matrix. I remind kids they really are in a YAF dystopia in which the education system is trying to mold them into interchangeable, disposable, replaceable soldiers and laborers to be inserted into billionaire vanity projects, used up and discarded, and their story is how they escape that paradigm.

That’s our story too.

Can you provide an example where science cannot explain a situation, because I can’t honestly think of any.

If you get sick then that’s biology.
If your boiler bursts and your house floods that’s an engineering problem.
If lightning strikes your house and your home burns down then that’s just physics.

Just because it sucks doesn’t mean science can’t explain it, and it doesn’t mean that it’s inexplainable.

Ultimately everything is either physics or politics, both of which are very easy to understand at a basic level. Especially politics.

This is something I really don’t understand. Maybe you can explain it to me.

For me a “normal” day would be one where earth looks like the moon. The fact that we have all kinds of plants and animals is amazing and the fact that we have buildings, technology and culture is something to be very proud of, because every day that you don’t run around killing people or doing other horrible things is a day where you overcame your instincts and helped hold up culture. So to me every day, even one that you would deem “shit that happens in your life”, is absolutely amazing and something to be proud of.

But for someone who believes that there is a God a normal day would be one where everything works out great, and it would just be because God took care of it. A bad day would mean that for whatever reason this God decided to let you suffer. And this is supposed to make you feel good?

Isn’t it uplifting to say that you can’t explain why bad things happen to you? Do you really think it’s uplifting to think that bad things happen to you because an all powerful being decided that you deserved it?

Stoicism has been tainted a bit recently by attention from some fringe groups, but stoicism itself is still a very enlightened way to see the world, IMO

At the sametime I also acknowlede that there are some gray areas where science can’t provide a logical explanation so as to why this is happening to some of the life events.

What do you mean? Why does that matter, what would that explanation do for you?

So to atheists of lemmy, how do you cope up with shits that happens in your life that you can’t explain logically and you really don’t have much control?

I can explain most things logically, that is not the problem. The problem is that the logical explanation still usually sucks. Being religious would only provide an explanation - that can’t really be true, let alone helpful. Presumably I’d rationalize everything with how an infinitely loving, powerful and all-knowing God needed me to have a shit time, for reasons, because that makes a lot of sense. That belief wouldn’t change much, other than potentially leading me to make profoundly irrational choices. I can manage that perfectly fine on my own, thanks all the same.

I go to the orange and black website and forget about everything

Everything that happens is like water flowing down a river. I don’t get mad at gravity and the water for acting according to the laws of physics, why do that for other things? It’s much easier to accept it for what it is and try to move forward to the best of my ability

there’s more to the analogy/perspective but I don’t feel like putting it into words. Hopefully it’s helpful

Basically, do what you can, don’t do what you can’t. Shit happens, however you want to rationalize it, it still happens.

I try to balance by adding joy to my life and others around me. Loving people, laughing, and a sense of humor about myself helps. Life has a random element. I also try to concentrate attention on the good and what I can control. I have an insatiable curiosity about everything, that keeps me busy, in the meantime.

We all have a limited time in this life, and at some point in the next two hundred years, are certain to recycle our atoms to nature.

Honestly, I think we have it a lot easier than the theists in that regard. If someone dings my car, I find that my dog has cancer, or I lose my job, I don’t have to address the problem of evil. I don’t need to figure out how to square the idea of an omnipotent and omnibenevolent god with misfortune. I don’t need to wonder if I am being punished or tested, and I don’t have to worry about prayers that aren’t being answered.

There are multiple non-theistic philosophies and religions that offer a framework for understanding and coping with negative events. Neither Buddhism nor Taoism have an explicit dependency on anything supernatural, especially in the schools and forms most popular in the West. The general idea is that we need to be less attached to certain outcomes and that our suffering arises more from our wanting the world to be how it isn’t.

There’s also a large number of non-theistic schools in Western philosophy that have taken their own various approaches to questions ranging from the meaning of life and the meaning of suffering to how to identify and pursue the good. There’s multiple schools of existentialism, of course, but I would even think that writings on the nature of justice (eg John Rawls, Michael Sandel, Peter Singer), the nature of the ego and human experience (eg Thomas Metzinger), and even works of film and literature can help approach an understanding, which is itself perhaps the best coping mechanism.

some gray areas where science can’t provide a logical explanation so as to why this is happening to some of the life events.

Not really sure about this one. Science doesn’t have answers for really big questions, like why does the universe exist. But for stuff smaller than that, like “why do I have some disease”, or “why did I lose a loved one” … or just “why did I lose 200$ dollars at the casino” well science tells us a lot about how it’s all one giant lottery we have been playing involuntarily, and we are all really bad at it.

We take chances just by existing. It’s literally called a genetic lottery. We take a chance by getting in a car or stepping out onto the street to go to the market. Just by loving people we take the chance that something could take them away. Life deals you a hand. You win some, you lose some. You don’t get to decide what your odds are. The best you can do is play the hand you’ve got. Which to be honest, is a lot less control than we tend to think we have. And even then, most of us don’t play our hand all that great, cause we are thrust into the game of life without a practice round. And we are often too young and arrogant to listen to those who have come before us who already learned the hard way. Worse yet, we see few of our peer’s mistakes, so we have a poor sense of what success and failure really looks like.

Science tells us about the gambler’s fallacy, the human bias towards falsely thinking that the universe tends towards some kind of fairness or equilibrium which is patently false (consider how little the gambler expects “good luck” to turn bad, therefore why gamble at all if it always equalizes?). Karma doesn’t mean the universe owes you exactly what you put in. Life doesn’t hand out exact change.

Science also tells us about how we (humans) don’t truly understand randomness. In nature, successive repetitions of some outcome of luck are vastly more common than we tend to think they are. We see a series of bad luck outcomes and say “that’s not natural, this can’t be real” when in fact it is often the natural laws of the universe on full display.

Despite it all, even if the game of life makes no promises to you at all, it sure as hell is better than not playing the game at all. Regarding karma, the only thing you can be sure of–and forgive me for using a dead meme but it is apt–is that you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

Edit for the pedants: gambler’s fallacy actually means that past results of independent events do not predict future outcomes, but that’s basically what I just said.

Said the rich man to the poor man, and the poor man to the rich; “this too shall pass”