Many people rejecting the existence of gods feel a flush that accompanies liberation. I see it as similar to a prisoner getting free of handcuffs in a locked room believing they are completely free simply because they can move about in the room. If one leaves the cuffs around the pipe, escaping the secondary means of confinement lies ahead.

Our 'secondary means' is both external and internalized. Externally if we continue subscribing to remaining unexamined notions that are also part of our captivity represented by the room, blindness to our continued captivity remains. We reject the gods but cling to their products in the form of cultural and even sometimes legal rituals and rules. We must not forget that the gods themselves were created by male humans to serve their common goal; that of a few maintaining power over many.

Internally, we become complicit, I think out of conditioning, in our own oppression by freeing ourselves of one kind of orthodoxy only to turn around and subscribe to another to 'fill in the space'. As a consequence of being formed within authoritative circumstances, trust in our own instincts and ability to reason independently is undermined. We often feel unworthy to take up all of our own space ourselves as our own authority. Isn't doing so emancipation by definition?

To use another example, I see most atheist/agnostic individuals as having escaped the plantation while failing to see the necessity of continuing flight until they reach a 'free state'.

How many of us remain 'under the spell' of other institutional and ideological fabrications like reinforcing rituals and alternative ideologies fabricated by Patriarchal Judas Goat, god makers? Pie in the sky and pie on Earth both taste the same. They taste like nothing because they don't exist. Both are merely 'faith based' expectations with different kinds of pastors and prophets unified in a common goal. Both are promises by a class of bakers with only one kind of product: different nothing flavored half-baked schemes for containment of their prey.

We can't see or taste promised pie. We are equipped though, with the ability to see and reason as individual creatures; to resist efforts of self-appointed betters to convince us to abdicate our equipment in favor of theirs. If only we'll follow them with the first step toward a life of substitutes, to return to an existence based on artifice that produces nothing but more of it's own essence.

Gods are only a tool in the shop of air pie. Pollitical ideologies are another. Trusting other 'authoritative interpretations' over what our own senses tell us is another. Mistrust of our own allegedly weak, non-certified (conditioned) instinctual perceptions is another. Individually or in concert, they convey but one message to anyone with the audacity to declare their own native judgement to be definitive. That message is: Who are you to have an opinion of your own?

Addiction is rife within environments of artifice. It is the primary means of control; accepting a substitute in 'place of' what has been made unobtainable in captivity. In place of is the definition of placebo. If one is hungry and available 'food' choices are largely comprised of artificial sweetener, artificial fat and the artificial appearance of protein, two things will happen. 1. Diminishing nutritional returns will increase consumption. 2. The feeling of never getting enough will increase until life itself expires from deprivation of what it really needed.

Freedom from addiction requires freedom from artifice. There is only one geiger counter capable of detecting radiating bullshit. It is the very, oft very damaged, instrument occupying the space between our ears. You must have heard the comparison between a cucumber and a pickle used to describe the relative permanence of damage we sustain from substance abuses. A pickle cannot be reversed to the state of cucumber and a sensible person wouldn't expect it to.

Pickles are not alive... They are preserved organic remains of an erstwhile living state filled with life energy. Addicts brain chemistry is altered and believed to be permanent only because means of restoration have yet to be discovered. To 'kick' the substance is to escape the cuffs; to run from the plantation. Until one can reach the free state of genuine sobriety, emancipated from accepting enticements of artifice, a high degree of vulnerability remains.

Struggling for clear vision, individual and intellectual liberty never ends but ability to recognize and reject counterfeit trappings is easier, the further we distance ourselves from the morass; from sources of radiating artifice. Life and life force is real. It is perceivable primarily by function and revelation of elements of intentionality. It manifests and animates life forms. Getting in touch with it internally as our benefactor, sustaiiner and healer happens within. Acceptance and love of self with gratitude for our special human gifts are keys and compass to freedom from artifice.