I’ve been thinking about atheism this past week. I listened to a talk by philosopher Alain de Botton on what he calls “Atheism 2.0.” (Find it at TED.com.) In it, he laments the fact that nonreligious people miss out on a good many traditions that come with being a believer — the weekly fellowship with people of like mind, the transcendent music, the inspired art, for example.

It’s been about seven years since I left the last church I attended regularly. I was a faithful and involved member of a large Salina church for several years.

I left at the beginning of what I now refer to as my mid-life crisis, a time when several major life changes came upon me and buried me like a wall of bricks. I left the church because I didn’t believe in hell, and I didn’t feel I was in integrity staying at the church, especially being a visible part of the worship service.

One can’t make up one’s mind to believe something. You either do believe something or you don’t. You can perhaps be persuaded one way or another if evidence supports a different point. But all my understanding of a loving God couldn’t support the idea of hell.

Although that year was certainly a difficult one on many levels, I have no regrets about leaving the Christian church. But I do miss a lot about the tradition.

I miss the people, the friends I saw every week. I miss the music, the sermons, the get-togethers.

I wouldn’t call myself an atheist. Whatever made the universe, the force behind the beginning of time as we know it, 13.7 billion years ago — whatever that force was, or rather, is, that’s what I would call God.

And since there was nothing before the beginning, as far as we know, then all that is must be made of that force, through and through. That’s how I see it — God within us, God all around us.

And that idea still holds for me the sacredness and unfathomable mystery it always has.

The church I grew up in as a little girl and into my teens was a beautiful old Episcopal church, with stained-glass windows depicting the great stories of the faith, with statues standing holy and wise, with young altar boys and girls holding candles to light the way for the priests in their embroidered robes, with the choir singing hymns and the scent and smoke of incense swirling throughout the sanctuary.

Atheists and other … what shall I say? … unaffiliated people do miss a lot by not going to a weekly church service.

While I spend time in silence, meditation or prayer most days, I no longer think of God as a heavenly father who watches over me. The child in me misses that comfort. I take consolation, though, in the idea that whatever is behind the godly force of creation seems to be going in a certain direction, toward ever-greater complexity and ever-greater unity. I also brighten at the idea of connection to the stars in the sky, as well as all the people in the world. We share 99 percent of our DNA with all other people, 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees and a considerable chunk with fireflies and bananas. How could one be lonely?

We unaffiliated don’t have the traditional church calendar to remind us of the noble lessons of life (although retailers certainly won’t let us forget the goodness of giving when it’s coming up on Christmas). Churches remind us that even small gifts are valuable; that telling the truth, even when it’s difficult, is honorable; that giving hours in service to others is worthwhile; that we shouldn’t judge one another, or be unkind or selfish. Churches remind us that even when things look bleak, there is hope.

As I write this, I imagine fundamental Christians at this point shaking their heads in pity over my missing the main point: that Jesus is the way and the truth and the life, and that all my hope and attempts at human goodness are worthless without that confession.

The Rev. Michael Dowd, who wrote “Thank God for Evolution” and who still considers himself a Christian, recorded a talk a couple of years ago, just two hours after learning that he had an especially aggressive form of cancer and could die soon, perhaps within a few weeks. (He has since undergone chemotherapy and surgery and is cancer-free.)

The possible imminence of his death brought him to this question: “If I have only one message left to deliver to the world, what would it be?” The answer to that question resulted in this talk: “The New Atheists as God’s Prophets,” which I highly recommend for both atheists and believers … and the unaffiliated.

Who are the new atheists? They are those who tell us of reality, which in Dowd’s mind is another name for God.

Dowd makes the distinction between subjective and objective truths. Atheists speak objectively, using documented, evidential, tested and peer-reviewed methods of discovery. Subjective truths are those that mean something to an individual, such as “I feel God’s love in my heart.” That’s not something you can prove to anyone objectively, but something you feel within yourself.

It seems to me religion has something unbelievers long for, and atheists have something believers need, and that the two groups could have a beautiful, meaningful, lifelong conversation if their prejudices could be put aside.

Attending sessions ranging from the practical (exploring how people who trigger you negatively also offer a gift of insight) to the intellectual (“5th Order Perspectival Complexity and the Creative Process” was one talk I attended); from inspiring (the Rev. Michael Dowd and the extraordinary futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard) to hilariously shocking (Zen monk Stuart Davis), it was an amazing experience.

I also took whirlwind classes in aikido (loved it), tai chi (perfect for early morning after the New Year’s Eve dancing) and an intense form of yoga (my legs felt like Jell-O afterward).

As I mentioned last week, I was an assistant to Dowd during the week; I absorbed as much as I could from him during his breakout classes and plenary session. Dowd said he has been well-received by atheists and Christians alike. His talks about our common creation story, from the Big Bang (he prefers the term “Great Radiance”) to the formation of stars and planets, molecules and cells, plants and animals and people, were awe-inspiring.

Dowd spoke on integrity, death, ecology and other topics, from an evolutionary perspective.

He talked about how testosterone levels dramatically increase when men rise in status or power in political, corporate and other social realms. In addition, women’s testosterone levels increase when they’re around high-status men.

This sequed nicely into how educating young people about their instinctual proclivities in a rational, evolutionary way would be helpful.

“Oh,” a high school boy might say, “my reptilian brain thinks I should mate with all these healthy-looking, attractive young women because it thinks I need to spread my genes far and wide; but my pre-frontal cortex has learned that these urges are simply millions of years’ worth of conditioning and a mismatch in my current environment.”

In terms of practicality, the sustainability of our planet was a major topic.

Dowd said, “I don’t have to tell you to not cut off your leg. It’s part of you; of course, you’re not going to be tempted to cut it off.”

But when we cut down huge swaths of the Amazon rainforest, he said, we’re cutting away our external lungs. They are a part of us, but because we think we’re separate from them, we don’t understand that we’re hurting ourselves when we cut them down.

Death was a fascinating topic in one session. Dowd said that 98 percent or more of all species that have ever lived on the planet are extinct. From one perspective, that’s a very good thing.

If species didn’t die off — not just individuals, but whole species — we wouldn’t be alive today, he said. There simply wouldn’t be enough room on our little globe to support us.

People often look upon death as an enemy, but Dowd made the point that we are bankrupting future generations by keeping people alive on modern life-support systems. We may be upsetting a necessary balance of life and death, and certainly we are spending insane amounts of money to keep hearts beating a few more days or weeks when quality of life is gone. That’s not to say that medical breakthroughs are not welcome, only that keeping people alive unnaturally because we think of death in adversarial terms doesn’t make sense; it’s hurting our economy and bankrupting our children and grandchildren for no real benefit.

The bottom line for this conference was a message repeated in one way or another by most of the speakers: We are the universe becoming aware of itself.

The first time a creature could hear, that was the first time the universe could hear itself; the first time a creature could see, that was the first time the universe had a glimpse of itself.

Dowd described the Apollo astronauts as a piece of the earth looking back at itself for the first time.

“We aren’t just of earth; we are earth,” he said. “We didn’t get born into it; we grew out of it, like an apple grows out of a tree.”

He compared ideas like this to Bible verses such as Genesis 2:7:

“Then the LORD God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” (NIV)

“That’s a true statement,” Dowd said, written in “night language,” the language of dreams — the way earlier man would describe events that were impossible to explain without the knowledge that would come much later.

I bought a DVD set from Dowd at the conference, “The Great Story: The marriage of science and religion for personal and planetary well-being.” I was eager to watch one of the talks on it, “The Next 250 Years,” because he had said it was a profoundly encouraging outlook based on 13.7 billion years of history.

To be sure, there are plenty of huge challenges ahead and lots of “wild cards,” things that could go wrong, such as an asteroid hitting the Earth, or a supervolcano at Yellowstone, which is about 40,000 years past due. But there is also plenty to be enthusiastic about in evolutionary terms — the way our culture is developing an expanding compassion for others and the ever-increasing intelligence being shared across the world by way of the Internet, to name a couple of examples.

Dowd and his wife, Connie Barlow, have an enormous amount of free information on their website, thank godforevolution.com. You can also do a search of their names on YouTube and find many of their presentations on a wide range of topics.