I was Googling around, and I discover my old professor's book blog about atheists. Good to read you again, Mitch.

I believe in emotional religion. Almost every good thing I ever wrote (or every thing that people responded to) had a current of ex-Catholic feelings running underneath it, wild as a downed electric wire. As a writer, I learned to trust those old religious emotions, even thought I don't believe anymore.

I would argue that my writing imagination depends on the memories of Catholic awe, what Freud called the "oceanic feeling." There isn't a single intellectual reason to feel like that, but my adult mind has always been flavored by a bit of religious wonder and anxiety.

Mitch says:

"Surely, it is possible to experience all the ecstasy and pain of love"

Is love an experience like pain? Can love actually be experienced, held onto and recognized at a later date? Or is what we often call 'love' an emotional and semantical dressing of pleasure?

If love can be experienced then it is the opposite of hate. But surely, love is not the opposite of hate.

"Can't I (in some sense, don't I) similarly experience the feelings normally associated with religion -- submission to fate, awe at the universe, joy in existence, hope for the future, reverence for life"

You are the recording of those feelings. There is not an experiencer separate from his experience. Therefore, what you call "your" experience is meaningless as long as it is imagined in this fragmented context. To understand this is infinitely more important than the ponderance of "your" religious experience. There is significance in these experiences only when they are seen as one whole movement.