ILX Religiosity and Spirituality and Agnosticity and Atheicity Poll

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.

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

― ꙮ (map)

ok this but unironically

at the risk of being controversial i am very much a "when in rome" kind of person, someone inclined to "go along to get along". i got a lengthy history with religion, christianity in particular. so i lived in indiana for a decade and i did religion when i was there. that was what was available and expected - unitarian universalist, and then episcopalian. it's one of my special interests, honestly we _could_ have that "origen of the species" thread about early christian history. i mostly can't speak to non-christian religions, unless you're talking "ironic" ufo cults (scratch the surface of an ironic ufo cult and underneath there's often a real ufo cult) or, i guess, witchcraft - i think of myself as kind of culturally a witch, though i don't really practice.

the thing about christianity is that it has in the past done a lot of good, it's a complicated phenomenon. in nearly every case it's been a source of strength to both the oppressed and the oppressor alike. christianity through its history has been a beacon of hope to all sorts of different people.

except. except i don't really think i can say that about queer people. christianity has never really been _for_ queer people, only ever really _against_ them. that's why i say i'm "culturally a witch" - a lot of what christianity calls "occultism" is really just fucking queer. i mean you need do no more than look at eliphas levi's conception of "baphomet" (the name appears in medieval christian texts, likely as a corruption of "muhammad"). "half-human and half-animal, male and female, good and evil, etc.", sez the wiki article. "male and female" meaning that baphomet has tits and a dick. i mean, people can read into baphomet whatever they want, but for me, baphomet makes me feel _seen_, in a positive way.

all of this... "stone that the builders rejected" stuff, i mean, christianity appealed to me as someone who was different, who didn't fit in with the norms of society, and christianity seemed to embody both those norms and the possibility of a rejection of those norms. i'm into paradox. i was really into Dick when i was younger, and his ideas about gnosis, like there's something in there that's not too dissimilar from levi's, you know, "marriage of heaven and hell", except with christianity it never seemed to manifest as tits and a dick

i've said this before, but the whole idea of being "born again", to me that's the most fucking hilarious thing. oh, you're born again? you don't look any different to me. i grew tits. christianity talks a big game about change and community and all that shit but there's no fundamental basis or meaning to it. when christianity has meaning it's a movement of people who have something in common, who share a common oppression. catholicism, i was raised catholic and taught that it meant "universal" but universal religion is meaningless, see: why i stopped being a unitarian universalist. you can't actually be for everyone. you welcome some people in and other people leave. liberal christianity doesn't seem to get that. they talk a form of christianity that loves everyone equally, they love me and the people who want me dead in christ's name.

can christianity now stand for anything but hate? i don't think so. and i don't think it's an accident. i think it's the one thing christianity can't reconcile to itself, the one place where its promise of liberation for all fails: queer people.

queerness itself _is_ a religious experience for me, in some pretty profound ways that i'm not gonna get into right now. being queer fills the same place in my life that i tried, and failed, to fill with religion. and so i'm evangelically queer. i thought i couldn't be queer, and i was wrong, and i am so fucking happy about that. it's changed my life for the better. i'm here to spread the good news: even if you think you aren't queer, there are so many amazing ways to be queer! it's worth learning and exploring and figuring out if there's a flavor of queer that's right for you.

im many times on record in this thread but i guess its an essential topic tbf

one thing im not sure ive picked out before from my thoughts is the treatment of belief as a choice, either way, which ofc it isnt

“belief is a beauty thing” - jim kerr

Not that it's unpopular, especially in the wake of Trumpism, but viewing the nature of belief through the lens of kayfabe has been pretty helpful and I think doing so should be more popular -- like at least as popular as people chucking out their record collections when Marie Kondo was a thing.

Like Camaraderie and Lord Alfred I find a Mass to be great theater. Bells and incense etc. Even though I am not a believer at all.

Generally I can hang with Bertrand Russell and Philip Larkin and Francis David: religion seems aesthetically interesting, and practicing it can be quite soothing. There is a lot of rich history and culture around it. But from an epistemological viewpoint, it's really tough to support absolutist truth claims. Especially, exclusive ones. Having precisely one path up the mountain just feels like a cruel design for a universe. And I can't worship someone who is that openly cruel.

one thing im not sure ive picked out before from my thoughts is the treatment of belief as a choice, either way, which ofc it isnt

― close encounters of the third knid (darraghmac)

interesting. i'd like to hear more about your perspective on this.

An early passage in that Cave book that caught my eye:

As I’ve gotten older, I have also come to see that maybe the search *is* the religious experience – the desire to believe and the longing for meaning, the moving towards the ineffable. Maybe that is what is essentially important, despite the absurdity of it. Or, indeed, because of the absurdity of it. When it comes down to it, maybe faith is just a decision like any other. And perhaps God is the search itself.

Later, when questioned about the "magical thinking" of religion:

Some see it as the lie at the heart of religion, but I tend to think it is the much-needed utility of religion. And the lie – if the existence of God is, in fact, a falsehood – is, in some way, irrelevant. In fact, sometimes it feels to me as if the existence of God is a detail, or a technicality, so unbelievably rich are the benefits of a devotional life. Stepping into a church, listening to religious thinkers, reading scripture, sitting in silence, meditating, praying – all these religious activities eased the way back into the world for me. Those who discount them as falsities or superstitious nonsense, or worse, a collective mental feebleness are made of sterner stuff than me. I grabbed at anything I could get my hands on and, since doing so, I’ve never let them go.

I found this line of thinking intriguing.

Credo consolans

xp truly beautiful. shame about the child abuse.

i'd be more of a fan of religion if this story was canon

Most Delightfully Evil Thing Young Jesus Does in "The Infancy Gospel of Thomas" - a POLL

Danzig's favorite Gospel!

referring to this timeless gem for anyone who's wondering

Now, thoughts: it is interesting that Cave refers to the existence of God as a "technicality." If it were, it would be easy for religions to discard. Obviously, it isn't. I think the basic requirement for all religious communities is the agreement on some indisputable reality. Historically, this has meant a belief in gods; one or many. But the idea is: some deity exists, and their existence requires humans to behave one way or another.

It strikes me now that this shared belief might have to be supernatural to function at all, and this might be why attempts to build non-superstitious alternative to religion have been ineffective. After all, the existence of supernatural beings cannot be proven or disproven, and so we end up outside the realm of disputability. That is in contrast to every other kind of knowledge we can have about the world, especially scientific knowledge, whose whole basis is that it is disputable.

OTOH, the fact that every religion and every community invariably splinters into sects and sub-sects means that it probably doesn't matter. It's like people are just built to disagree.

Zchrys, there certainly have been (and are) Humanist gathering places and societies. They're just smaller and more quiet about it.

sorry i'm kinda divebombing in here with this, but i just feel like saying real quick that i think belief itself is completely beside the point. being is right there in front of us and is an obvious deep mystery. belief seems to arise out of that, always as some kind of explanation for it. i just think it's beside the point, like a second order effect or something.

i mentally categorize 'belief' and 'religion' as psychosocial phenomena that arise out of the fact that being is this wild-ass mystery we will never ever make heads or tails out of, but that we can still observe and be nourished by.

I don't remember if I posted in this thread years ago or not. Raised Catholic, haven't been inside a church in 30+ years. As an adult I have been intrigued by Zen Buddhism and Taoism and Stoicism and Norse beliefs (not so much the gods as the ethical codes of honor and what one owes to one's family and one's community) and have kind of cobbled them all together into a moral code/approach to life that works for me. As far as the supernatural? Hard no. Particularly since moving to an area where I am surrounded by nature, the glory of the physical world is all I need.

I mean, what do I need a god for when I can stand in the woods and stare up at 60-70 foot tall trees?

i agree with you about the glory of the physical world.

More musings from the Cave interview/book:

I think, these days, I would be more considerate towards the mediocre in us all. Well, maybe not the mediocre, but our ordinariness, our sameness.

It’s interesting that one of the most common concerns from people who write in to The Red Hand Files is a feeling of meaningless or emptiness. Also a deep bitterness and cynicism towards the world, that the world and humanity is essentially shit. And a loneliness, too. I guess what I try to do through the songs and through The Red Hand Files is to make the case that our lives are more valuable than perhaps we sometimes think them to be, or, indeed, than we are told they are. That our lives are, in fact, of enormous consequence, and that our actions reverberate in ways we hardly know.

-Well, to be fair, many atheists would agree with that.

I'm sure you're right. Still, there seems to be a growing current of thought that tends towards the opposing view, a sort of cynicism and distrust of our very selves, a hatred of who we are, or, more accurately, a rejection of the innate wonder of our presence. I see this as a sort of affliction that is, in part, to do with the increasingly secular nature of our society. There’s an attempt to find meaning in places where it is ultimately unsustainable – in politics, identity and so on.

-But, hang on, are you saying atheism – or secularism – is an affliction? And that you equate it with cynicism? I mean, come on, non-believers can have a sense of wonder at the world – with nature, the universe, with the wonders of science, philosophy and even the everyday.

No, I am not saying secularism is an affliction in itself. I just don’t think it has done a very good job of addressing the questions that religion is well practised at answering. Religion, at its best, can serve as a kind of shepherding force that holds communities together – it is there, within a community, that people feel more attached to each other and the world. It’s where they find a deeper meaning.

-What kinds of questions, in particular, would you say religion is more adept at answering?

It deals with the necessity for forgiveness, for example, and mercy, whereas I don’t think secularism has found the language to address these matters. The upshot of that is a kind of callousness towards humanity in general, or so it seems to me. And I think callousness comes out of a feeling of aloneness, people feeling adrift or separated from the world. In a way, they look for religion – and meaning – elsewhere. And increasingly they are finding it in tribalism and the politics of division.

-The decline of organised religion may be one reason for that, but there are others, of course, social and political.

Well, whatever you think about the decline of organised religion – and I do accept that religion has a lot to answer for – it took with it a regard for the sacredness of things, for the value of humanity, in and of itself. This regard is rooted in a humility towards one’s place within the world – an understanding of our flawed nature. We are losing that understanding, as far as I can see, and it’s often being replaced by self-righteousness and hostility.

And I'll stop posting clips. Like I said, I found the whole back-and-forth discussion unexpectedly provocative.

I'm a pretty hardcore atheist I guess in that I don't believe in anything supernatural or spiritual, but I could get down with some kind of vulgar animism. Watching birds flit about or squirrels run around it's easy to get lost in wonder that animals can even exist.

I'd agree that actual belief is beside the point, as one's own belief is a mystery box even to oneself, but professed belief very much is the point, and the more unbelievable something is, the more valuable the expressed belief is as a kind of summoning call/hazing filter. So existence of God isn't so much an irrelevant technicality, but would actually undermine how valuable it is to profess that belief.

That makes it really difficult to build a fervent and cohesive following around the splendor of the physical world as is. We have to imbue it with unbelievable healing powers or something supernatural to make it sacred. It was telling when William Shatner came down from his space flight and his reaction to the overview effect, this transformative experience of seeing the entire natural world as he knew it from the other side, was a profound depression -- "The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands... It filled me with dread." OK, sounds right, but that's not the way to bolster an environmental movement!