ILX Religiosity and Spirituality and Agnosticity and Atheicity Poll

The only valuable institutions are those that serve to venerate God and bring awareness of His Word to all of Creation.

If you want government to be a certain way -- whatever way that is! even if it's something I like! -- because God Told Us To, I have a real problem with that.

yes! and it's not just the atheists/agnostics who have a right to feel pissed about this, but also people of other faiths than those imposing these changes.

TBQH I cannot for the life of me figure out why you're so pissed off at me, when you've engaged repeatedly in all the things you're actually accusing me of doing. (Oversimplifying, misstating my positions, dismissing my experiences as either not valid or nonexistent, etc.) Do you want me to simply concede all your arguments, such as they are? Because I'm not going to do that, nor am I going to concede in advance that one particular book -- be it the Bible or The Authoritarians -- proves anything at all. Making the reading of one particular book, whatever it is, a condition of discussing Politics And Religion On The Ground In America 2010 -- when I and others both religious and otherwise actually live it every day -- is the kind of dogmatic approach I, and I hope you, actually oppose.

I'm sorry that the thread you started to discuss the book didn't get any love, but that's not my problem. Doesn't give you the authority (<----NOTE, A JOKE HA HA) to turn this thread into a referendum on the damned book.

verily, men's hearts are full of Wickedness

There is no god, but in the future a state equivalent to God might be achieved. Technology will have advanced the New Society to a level beyond current comprehension.

i like where this thread is going

yeah, playstation 4 is gonna kick ass.

xpost

http://nazareneblogs.org/kpprobst/files/2010/07/oopinin.jpg

Lol, I guess this is the debating style that has endeared Christianity to so many of you.

But screw you and your condescension anyway JFTR.

I like a man who speaks his mind.

If we're looking for consensus, though, this thread is actually pretty good. I think everyone here, regardless of faith or lack thereof, believes that secularism is a goal we wish to see fulfilled in our societies, right? If that is the case (and sorry if I forgot someone who doesn't wish this), is that all the strong atheists here want? Or would you like to be actively dissuading people from religious beliefs? Because if we do just want secularism, then as far as the social or policy implications of faith we're all on the same page.

How to achieve this is another question. Ironically, I think that Britain, while less religious as a whole, will have a more complicated job ensuring that the state plays no role in religious life. This is, of course, because of the monarchy and it's peculiar relationship with the established church. Because the church, the monarchy, and therefore the state are constitutionally entangled it's hard to see a way to disentangle them without widespread republican reforms.

Maybe if Labour had pushed through on their promises to replace the House of Lords we would have seen the momentum carry through to the elimination of the monarchy (I doubt it, actually), but I think we might have missed the chance on reform for this generation - other concerns are too pressing for constitutional change to occur.

America, at least, has a tradition of secularism (even if large parts of the population won't admit that) and I do sometimes find myself wondering if the religious right is something of a paper tiger. Either way, people do seem to be getting more confident about standing up for their right to live without interference from someone else's religious beliefs, and I see no reason why this tendency shouldn't continue to grow. Secularism in America could occur now, if it was anyone's priority, with the passing of some tax reforms, guarantees of educational independence etc. Admittedly a lot of these problems are hampered by ideas about states' rights, and I don't expect them to happen anytime soon, but I really don't see much cause for pessimism in regard to secular reform. Obviously my ignorance of the USA will show through here, and hopefully someone can help me understand the hindrances to reform a bit better.

But I do think the idea of State protection of religious sensibilities is dying out, and will continue to do so. This is probably why some activist religious groups have got 'whatever religious undergarments they wear' in a twist of late. It's important to recognize how much we all agree on this - politically if not personally. As I said upthread, I think religions lose out by being complicit in the State too.

Anyway, tl:dr, I know, I know - I'm bored and haven't slept, sorry.

I do basically share the goal, with what I think is the caveat that I think our societies have more or less got the balance right already. I wouldn't want to see their ethical foundations razed on principle (if for no other reason than that those foundations have served well enough to get us here in the first place), any more than I would wish to see religious principles explicitly reintroduced and bolstered as a basis for public life.

In the UK it works because the established church is vague and unobtrusive and hasn't relied on coercion for a very long time, instead serving essentially the same function as the monarchy does legally - though how well it can continue to be so and function faced with more aggressive assertions of faith/faithlessness is tricky, as one sees with various freedom of speech issues recently. In the US it seems to function because people do understand, value and respect the public/private divide, whatever shouty types may say - in the ground zero mosque furore, the wild divergence in poll results between 'should they build there?' and 'do they have the right to build there?' is revealing to me at least.

http://www.pewforum.org/Other-Beliefs-and-Practices/U-S-Religious-Knowledge-Survey.aspx

Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions.

http://www.pewforum.org/uploadedImages/Topics/Belief_and_Practices/religious-knowledge-01.png

what's the point of studying other, inferior, indisputed truths, tbf

Oh man, drunken, ill-advised revive.

Protestant childhood, agnostic atheist adolescence/young adulthood, sort of actively seeking, but kinda sad in way that I didn't expect that I would be, that I'll probably land back on agnosticism or some vague deism.

From ages 5-10 I attended a non-denominational Christian school in SE Ohio. I was sent there primarily, I'm told, because I was too scattered and weird as a kindergartener at public school. But also because my parents wanted me to have exposure to Christianity a. as an important part of my culture, b. as something they both had grown up in. My mom had a religious upbringing that seems to have been mostly edifying. She was raised in a Baptist church that has since (it's a source of no small pride on my maternal family's side) formally broken with the Southern Baptist Convention. She got radicalized at Penn, traveled west, lived in a bogus ashram, and all that, but Christianity was a source of succor, and her conception of Jesus most certainly informed her passion for social justice. My mom's side of the family has always seemed to me temperamentally inclined to secularism. Religion was there, but it never seemed focused, especially, on sin or prescription. When I went to this school, we attended a Methodist church. My memories are all of me and my mother attending alone, though I don't know if this is accurate. My experience at the school was similarly good. Instances of unkindness between were noticed and vocally addressed by teachers/administrators and discussed. I don't remember much of an emphasis on guilt or shame (though that may have had a lot to do with my young age). I remember some teachers individually saying some shit that didn't jibe, like that I was supposed to "love Jesus even more than my parents." And I thought God was a fucking dick for turning Lot's wife into a pillar of salt. One teacher revised the history of life on earth as recorded in our science book and shit like that, but on the other hand no one really freaked out about my speculation that the 6 days of creation weren't days as we understand them. As formative religious experiences go, not bad. When I was 11, my dad had a mental breakdown, we moved, and I stopped being Christian or believing in God, though at the time those things didn't appear so obviously connected. (And maybe they weren't. I think just being a thoughtful kid and hitting puberty can induce these changes.) I remember having a personal conversation with Jesus at some point during a boring car ride where I asked Him into my heart (some evangelical thing I guess I had picked up at my school) and failing to feel a transformation, and the whole implausible thing just sort of gently falling away.

The particular flavor of my dad's paranoid schizophrenia (and I think the particular flavor IS crucial, despite what American psychiatry might say) focused a lot around ideas of condemnation and hell. He was CONVINCED he was going to hell and would wail and scream in the house. He usually had a sense of humor and insight into his psychosis, which made it bearable for me as a kid (and extremely difficult as an adult as I imagine what suffering that insight might have entailed). Oh, Dad's just being wacky and indulging in his hell fantasies again...Why is there a skull and cross-bones on the calendar? Oh, Dad's just worked out some elaborate mathematical personal doom prediction based on the Nazi occult... My theory now is that his illness collaborated with his obsession with Nazi Germany, his fire-and-brimstone Christian upbringing, and his very ungrounded and emotionally immature attempts to study Indian philosophy, to create his particular hell. Point being it all colored my idea of what it could mean to be religious. I hadn't been raised or taught that way, but my dad's experience showed that religiosity was a dreadful seizure to be avoided. I had/have periodic fears of an unwanted religious epiphany in the exact same way that I fear losing my mind. An annihilation of self, a painful removal from the world. I felt like for me, obviously tainted with my dad's genetic material, it would always have to be an all-or-nothing. I resented people who could be Christian in a way that I erroneously deemed as "casual," that is not mystic, nor flagellant, nor insane. It's been 15 years since I read it, but William James' chapter on "Sick-Souled Religion" resonated deeply with what I feared and avoided.

I kinda moved out of that space to being pretty much take-for-granted agnostic. I've felt like it's arrogant and gives too much credit to human understanding to be staunchly atheist, even though there are moments in terms of subjective, irrational experience I've felt deeply atheist. I sometimes half-assedly resolve stuff with "materialism, but we just don't know exactly how that material functions." But lately I've been more interested in concepts of grace, trust, unresolvable paradox. And trying to conceptualize the crucifixion and resurrection in a way other than "God sent his only son to die for our sins" (wth, no one asked you, God, and you're the one who defined the sins and why should I, as a modern person, believe in blood sacrifice of a human being), but maybe ---though I am far from taking this literally---God in Christ experienced ultimate human suffering and subsequently defeated death to acknowledge and vindicate the faceless many who have suffered. Idk it's a stretch but it's still a beautiful idea.

She was raised in a Baptist church that has since (it's a source of no small pride on my maternal family's side) formally broken with the Southern Baptist Convention.

ha, I remember when the southern baptist convention broke off from the baptist world alliance & even the most gentle & inclusive voices in the uk were struggling to get very sad about it

yeah, it's pretty important in my mom's family to emphasize to others, especially non-Southerners who hear Baptist and assume a lot of things, SBC is not how we roll

Point being it all colored my idea of what it could mean to be religious. I hadn't been raised or taught that way, but my dad's experience showed that religiosity was a dreadful seizure to be avoided. I had/have periodic fears of an unwanted religious epiphany in the exact same way that I fear losing my mind. An annihilation of self, a painful removal from the world.

...I've felt like it's arrogant and gives too much credit to human understanding to be staunchly atheist, even though there are moments in terms of subjective, irrational experience I've felt deeply atheist. I sometimes half-assedly resolve stuff with "materialism, but we just don't know exactly how that material functions." But lately I've been more interested in concepts of grace, trust, unresolvable paradox.

At the time, I was quite staunchly atheist. Scientifically-minded, skeptical materialism seemed the only defensible position from which to approach questions about the nature of the world. I was, or would have said I was, "interested" in religion. But it never stood a chance. I attended quite a few religious services and meetings of various kinds during my high school and college years, telling myself that I was open to whatever I might find, but in reality my approach was faux-scholarly and rather condescending. I really just wanted to check them off my list. In the long run, I've come around to a position much like what you describe in the second passage, especially with regard to "unresolvable paradox". Not every question demands an answer. Sometimes the question is sufficient in itself.

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to post, drunk or not.

paragraph 1, 2nd to last sentence: "It was, I suppose, simple escapism."

i do think the fellowship is the most important thing to people. while i suppose i could grade out religions and sects if required. i understand some of them to be loathesome hateful vats of identity, but no, no approved lists. yet.

i often wish i could be theist! but i am not, and almost all varieties seem and feel very nonsensical when explained to me. i do enjoy considering aspects of buddhism and zen buddhism, but no. if spiritual enlightenment exists, i assume it arrives, when it does. but if you do not do zazen and focus the mind, it likely will not. and even if you don't it may not.

even if you _do_ it may not obv.

the poetry of the ocean at night man, i mean what else is there

what the fuck is fellowship? there's this thing called friendship iirc. it usually does not involve pipelining into an institution of power, which is what any organized religion ultimately is.

community

brb going to call my next dinner party for my gay ladies 'fellowship'

xxp I think it was the closest translation of the Greek word κοινωνία (koinonia) from the New Testament, which refers to a sense of community, deeper than just friendship. Now, of course, it's just a way to set up an us vs. them dynamic (and don't get me started on the use of "fellowship" as a verb).

hmm that's a weird verbification. transitive or intr?

I've heard it as "Let's fellowship" or "Come fellowship with us," so intransitive.

huh. thx. if i was at all churched i guess i'da heard that one.

and yeah i understand fellowship to include feelings of shared identity, understanding, and community, not sure why. because i'm rather um, "unfellowed"?

unfellowshipped, surely. my error.

There’s several worthwhile parts of this interview with a religious studies scholar where they actually go into _why_ you want religious scholar as a category of scholarship:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AU73xbp6Ps

One of them is that what we call “religion” didn’t really form as a distinct think of social practices until we get Protestantism/nationalism/liberalism(and this capitalism) as distinct categories in the 15th-16th Century. Also that focusing solely on the stated beliefs is an (American) Protestant vibe.

Fellowship is a completely separate category to friendship. Fellowship is a continously lived in, passive state. It's something you exist in whether you're with your local religious community for the millionth time, or if you're across the world walking through the doors of a new church/mosque/synagogue etc. It being weaponised in damaging us vs them cultural debates is real, but it's also a crude reversal of what fellowship actually is: taking a bunch of us and thems, and unifying them.

i often wish i could be theist! but i am not, and almost all varieties seem and feel very nonsensical when explained to me.

Same. It would be so comforting to believe in something. Anything. I think about this all the time. I also yearn for felllowship without the jesus-y part. I need to join some clubs. Or a commune.

unfellowshipped, surely. my error.

I used to work with a woman from Jehovah's Witness background who was disfellowshipped for falling in love with someone the church disapproved of. Her family no longer talked to her and people would cross the street if they saw her coming.

At least now she can celebrate birthdays.

I'm a Catholic atheist, I enjoy the mystery, the ritual and the spectacle, but find listening to priests talk extremely off-putting, so I only occasionally go to Latin solemn mass just to enjoy the aural landscape and the incense. The community part sounds nice but the thought of making friends with Catholics doesn't really appeal, this is one of the main things I learned at school, and as I am essentially there fraudulently it seems like a bad idea.

When we moved to the UK in 2016 we found that the only people keen to make friends with us were religious groups, so now almost everyone my wife knows is either Ba'hai, Jehova's Witness or Falun Gong, they are generally nice people and we just don't mention that we find the idea of a personal god fundamentally ludicrous.

Theism has been incredibly grounding for me. Tough to talk about these things though without appearing either as a braggart or a moron (even within "fellowship")

my grandma's sister is a Jehovah's Witness. she hasn't really had anything to do with her siblings in decades but sent my great uncle a card after he went for an operation recently. my grandma & great uncle don't have much nice to say about her but they thought that was interesting.

I have met the JW's children (my mum's cousins), both of whom have left the JW's but they are both still pretty strange people.

x-posts - Also a Catholic atheist though I haven't been to mass other than for weddings in oh idk over 20 years at least. I still love the sights and sounds etc. so this made me smile to myself because I completely get it - "aural landscape and the incense".

My husband’s aunt is a Jehovah’s Witness. Even though she doesn’t celebrate Christmas she always sends us Christmas cards and me a birthday card (with money in it!) every year. Nice woman. When we lived in London, we’d get them knocking on the door occasionally, and initially the husband could scare them off by pretending to be Muslim but after a few years they’d be like “Oh that’s fine! Can we come in and talk to you?”

I was raised Catholic, like 99% of people in Ireland. Do I believe in God, yes. I very rarely feel the need to talk about it unless asked - it’s personal. I find demonstrative and overt religiosity extremely uncomfortable and tbh to be posturing. Also strongly influenced by growing up in a country where the primacy of the Church influenced government policy and oppressed us, ofc.

My family is not really religious - tbf I don’t consider myself “religious” and if I had to use 100 adjectives to describe myself it wouldn’t be one of them, it wouldn’t even crack the top thousand. I almost never attend Mass or anything - which has had an effect no doubt, but my maternal family all attended Mass pretty regularly, rural Mass-going people you know!

What could I ascribe as meaningful about this? Hard to say. Have always found confession, repentance and penance to be personally meaningful though those are ofc not exclusively Catholic values. I am married to an atheist, which my mother finds weird, “to believe in nothing”, but I don’t. We spend time visiting churches whenever we travel and I find beauty and meaning and a sense of something when we do. I remember visiting some random place in Belgium and being moved to tears by a sense of presence. Ha, I feel like such a wanker even saying that. But other than that I don’t really like talking about it much, mostly because almost nobody I know is on the same page as me, and to me that’s fine actually, because like I said, personal.

"Actively religious" wasn't a option for this poll which reflects a dull reality: religion and culture are often seen as mutually exclusive areas of concern. You either get up to post about Hyperpop and Jandeks next Manhattan gig, or you get down to the vespers and the local bible study. Why can't we all have our daily bread, and eat it too?

I remember visiting some random place in Belgium and being moved to tears by a sense of presence

I had a similar experience also in Belgium, weirdly. I started crying in a church because I was so moved but I don't know if it was because of a presence since I don't believe in God or anything for that matter at all. I think I was moved by the beauty of the church itself and the beliefs of the other people there.

That should have said "God or anything at all for that matter". Been a long week.

The Nick Cave book/interview "Faith, Hope and Carnage" has a lot of really thoughtful, moving, provocative stuff to say about, well, faith, but also specifically religion, especially considered in the wake of his son's death. I posted the recommendation to the/a Cave thread, but it's well worth a read, imo.

it’s interesting— even as a non theist/agnostic/atheist i don’t perceive my system as “to believe in nothing” (though i suspect i’m sort of mischaracterizing the actual intent of that summary). Still, instead i think/feel of religion as a kind of like, an interesting or even fascinating intersectional behavioral collection of— dunno, ideas? rules for living? social systems? i must think more about it. and i i’ve not yet. it is more of just an “understanding” in the back of my mind. and often intuitive. but it’s not like “believing in nothing” outside of my own mind and perception, or outside of this perceptual world. rather, i can perceive or believe in no external, intentional agency.

so god feels fake but religion seems real

There is definitely a particular understanding in religion that is worth indulging in at one point or another simply to experience the richness of life. I think a belief in God can be separate from this. In fact I think a belief in God must be separated from this if you're going theist. It's a small God that only lives in religious rites and church incense. But where I'm sceptical about evangelising belief, I'm utterly on board with spreading the good news that religious rite is an open door, and a part of the world worth experiencing (and hey maybe it's not for you! My wife doesn't like sport the weirdo)

TBC I was raised religious, attended mass most Sundays until I left home, and went to Catholic school so it's not as though I haven't given the whole religion thing a good college try. I just can't get past the fact that to me it all just seems like BS designed to make people feel better about the many terrifying, cruel, and unexplainable things in life. Trust me, I wish I could believe in something. I think it would be a lot more comforting but I just can't.

Hunt3r's description of atheism is quite apt. It's not really belief in "nothing." I don't consider myself an atheist, but I struggle with that idea of an intentional God who has a discernible Will. There was a (brief, and increasingly distant) time in my life where I believed in such a God wholeheartedly. But for most of my life, I've found the idea of such a God unthinkable and unbelievable in the most literal senses of those words.

These days my position is agnosticism: there could very well be a God, but if there is, it is likely nothing like what people imagine, or are even capable of imagining. I find people who say they know the will of God extremely arrogant, and always return to that bit from Cat's Cradle: "She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is Doing."

Xxps I get that, many conversations with friends where it all just get reduced down to: we're both seeing mostly the same thing, agreeing on most points, communicating clearly about religion, but one of us believes and one doesn't and that's just some unbridgeable gap and so let's just go on.

I mean belief is a real property right? Makes sense it would be that way.

I find people who say they know the will of God extremely arrogant

I'm a Catholic atheist, I enjoy the mystery, the ritual and the spectacle,

*raises hand*

I also dig the robes and incense.