ILX Religiosity and Spirituality and Agnosticity and Atheicity Poll

xp I feel like I was saying the opposite -- our own minds are unknowable, or do you mean not taking other people's professed beliefs at their word?

lol Neanderthal

map, that was a dickish response to Philip

in all realness my trouble with believing in the Christian God has been, if what he and his Son said are so important, why has he been ok with letting everybody fuck up the message so badly for the last 2,000 years, like...for a long time the two of them are stage managing everything, and then just disappear forever and in some cases the Biblical canon is still in dispute!

I never got past it, even as a youth, it was this huge seed of doubt that pulled at me but really I just left the church because the fundies wanted me to choose between them and Slayer and I chose Slayer

nick caves projections of atheism arent tbh of any value or interest

its literally just not believing in god, ppl need to chill

"the more unbelievable something is the more valuable the expressed belief is" is tantalisingly close to profound but alas it again imbues expressed belief as something innately valuable

and remember we are talking about belief in a god of whatever stripe here, not like belief in democracy or ubi or feeding the poor, stuff that imo you need to perform belief in as a service to actions and outcomes you think are good

expressed belief in a god is not this, even if you 100% believe that yr god is the source of all good outcomes and actions, yr actual belief in yr god is just a thing you have or dont have and expressing it and especially celebrating it or trying to spread it should probably be seen as the very weird behaviour it is

peace tho

So, is anyone in this joint a believer in one of the Big Three who regularly observes the rites of their religion? I'm curious.

that was a big oversight in the original options

I don't consider myself a believer, per se, but we (as a family, and as individuals in the family) inconsistently dip in and out of various rites and rituals, many of which are as tied culturally to Judaism as they are religiously. I assume it means something to them? At the same time, I'm not sure what they means to me, though probably more than nothing.

i think a healthy sense of respect for otherness is kind of required to be a person. ilx has so many dudes who think the answer to everything is in their own minds. sometimes i'm not sure how to be kind to that.

― ꙮ (map)

i think what you're saying makes more sense than a lot of the hot takes on this thread. sometimes being kind is a lot to ask. is an exceptional thing to ask.

otm

but like yeah some of the takes here on religion are just, like, totally orthogonal to how i look at it. like there's this point of view that sees it as an abstract theoretical construct, like "What Is The Ultimate Nature of Reality" or some shit, or maybe sometimes "What Is Delusion And How Do We Cure People Of It", and for me religion is more... what the fuck even is this. ok yeah i can cobble together some kind of empiricist explanation for some things but it seems to fall short somehow. particularly since empiricist explanations of, like, my queerness have tended to be made-up bullshit that didn't do me no favors. like, this isn't the only angle for me to approach this from but it's the _least controversial_... why am i a woman? you know what, how about magic, how about literal fucking magic, because you know what, y'all don't _have_ any convincing explanations, y'all can't even _say_ what a woman is, what a _gender_ is, y'all just making shit up and it's internally consistent and it has no relationship whatsoever to reality as people actually experience it.

xp map, alfred, if I was being a jerk, I wouldn't mind a dickish response, and would rather be disabused of whatever it is that bothers people about what I'm putting out. I mean, I came to that POV in the first place by being disabused of the idea that flat earthers etc... were absurd people who genuinely believed what they were saying. I mean, they're absurd for other reasons, but I did come to respect their otherness in a sense while respecting them much much less in other respects.

Trees and squirrels are cool but I am going to push back a bit on the notion of making nature your "higher power," or whatever.

I am really into human connections and art. Empathy and creativity are more important to me than any number of cool birds or whatever.

Like, yeah a forest or a mountain is really nice and I dig those but I get a bit more info from a novel, a symphony, a friend, a rock concert, sexual intercourse, a nonfiction audio book, an architecture tour, a history museum, etc.

Responding to a couple of things:

I know a lot of ILXors love the dude for various reasons, but Nick Cave has exactly the beliefs you'd expect a 66-year-old Australian man to have, and those beliefs hold very little interest for me.

I don't know about "vulgar animism" or any other kind, but animals are fucking amazing and one big part of religion, particularly the Big Three, seems to be setting oneself (meaning humanity) apart from the rest of the world. "Man had dominion over all the animals" and shit like that. And to me it's much more interesting to surrender to the idea that you are an animal, and your way of perceiving the world is just one way of perceiving the world and maybe not even the best one. I mean, other species have sensory arrays that would feel to us like superpowers or magic, but we're supposed to be "superior" to them because...we can drive bulldozers and make porn?

ymp you seem to be kind of insisting that you are competing with another persons expression of what they find wonder in

if we manage to disregard gods and instead it turns into competing arguments for what replaces them then lets just keep gods it saves having to burn a lot of museums

like, yeah a forest or a mountain is really nice and I dig those but I get a bit more info from a novel, a symphony, a friend, a rock concert, sexual intercourse, a nonfiction audio book, an architecture tour, a history museum, etc

We don't actually have the monopoly on sexual intercourse I don't think. Not that I'm advising venturing outside of humanity for these purposes.

I feel the weight of my existence most keenly in cathedrals (not necessarily in Belgium), in the woods, in the attention of an other and in art. I do not know if this is evidence of some higher power. My instinct tends toward the *not* but I'm unsure. And, in truth, the focal point, the endpoint, the whatever of it, is the least interesting and the least attainable part. I'm good with the mystery and am reasonably convinced it's just a quirk of consciousness, and an entirely agreeable one.

a forest or a mountain is really nice and I dig those, but I get a bit more info from a novel, a symphony, a friend, a rock concert, sexual intercourse, a nonfiction audio book, an architecture tour, a history museum, etc.

I could be way off base here, but using this particular set of comparisons makes it sound like you appreciate a forest or a mountain mainly as a kind of intermittent aesthetic experience that happens inside your head when you are in their vicinity. aesthetics seem to me like a very narrow aperture through which to appreciate them.

Sorry, folks, no intention of dissing your formulations of meaning. Just, there are some people who speak about nature (and natural beauty) and science as the main alternatives to religious belief.

It seems like it's less common to hear about human interactions and human connections and human art-making as an alternative to religion. I want to forward those an alternative alternative.

Tldr: I am not arguing with anyone here, just arguing with other people in my personal orbit and wishing to present my own (probably idiosyncratic) perspective.

I see humans, nature, physics, art, religion, et. al. as facets of the same ground source we term "reality". there is no need to see them as alternatives to one another. each may be taken on their own terms, but no one presents more than a partial view of what is.

I've recently embarked on a relatively casual study of physics and it's made me question the rest of reality.

I read something recently that certain hardcore theoretical physicists consider all matter an emergent property and not worthy of study.

Could be a line out of Borges.

fair enough ymp

nb personally, everything is nature, including everything you note

i struggle to understand where youd stop calling things natural, tbh

'you'd' there is the wider sense, not yourself ymp

So, is anyone in this joint a believer in one of the Big Three who regularly observes the rites of their religion? I'm curious.

― poppers fueled buttsex crescendo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, 10 February 2024 07:17 (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

that was a big oversight in the original options

― close encounters of the third knid (darraghmac), Saturday, 10 February 2024 07:19 (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yes, and I thought that was funny seeing this poll. It's standard fare for my experience though. You can be religious, or you can have an interest in culture/intelligent-discussion/idunnowhatrewecallingtheworldthatilxcaresabout?. The mingling of the two is a strange fire and water trick to some people I meet. As an 18yo it took a while for my stoner band buddies to release the religion thing wasn't a bit ("How do you listen to pavement and believe in God" looooooooool). Given religion's popular presentation these days, both from itself and from others, I get it. I think it's unfortunate! But whatreyagonnado?

I've recently embarked on a relatively casual study of physics and it's made me question the rest of reality.

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Saturday, 10 February 2024 09:53 (seventeen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Me too! Spend my whole damn life denigrating those science nerds as 4-eyed losers who wouldn't know reality if it punched em in the face but ya know what? They actually know a thing or two about this whole world.

*realise

A close mate (atheist) and I typically circle back to punching down on the epistemological arrogance of the positivist world view as a unifying end to any discussion about God/religion. This joke, after years or re-reunning it, sadly led me to believe Science was actually boring and wtf everyone go study the humanities like actualy human beings? Doing some Scie study has cured this. Those dweebs are really onto something

One of the many things that fascinate me about the field (what little I know about it) is how far removed it is from our/my every day experience. I mean, the fundamental components of the universe may reside in 11-dimensional shapes? Being a math dunce especially, I really have a hard time wrapping my mind around it.

On the macro level, the various ways of speculating about multiple universes are mind-blowing.

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), Saturday, 10 February 2024 02:41 (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

He's a crypto-calvinist! Burn him!

One of the many things that fascinate me about the field (what little I know about it) is how far removed it is from our/my every day experience. I mean, the fundamental components of the universe may reside in 11-dimensional shapes? Being a math dunce especially, I really have a hard time wrapping my mind around it.

On the macro level, the various ways of speculating about multiple universes are mind-blowing.

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Saturday, 10 February 2024 10:37 (fifteen seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah, the micro stuff blows me away. I literally never did chemistry, so learning its general concepts for the first time... I really appreciate the imagination in it all. This crazy-technical riff on pre-socratic philosophy which has now become a tool that has built our entire modern world? The macro wonder and awe, religion covers that area for me. But science is doing some mind boggling stuff in investigating the micro which makes me feel like an absolute caveman at times.

in all realness my trouble with believing in the Christian God has been, if what he and his Son said are so important, why has he been ok with letting everybody fuck up the message so badly for the last 2,000 years, like...for a long time the two of them are stage managing everything, and then just disappear forever and in some cases the Biblical canon is still in dispute!

old religious like the Bible are constantly evolving through a fusion of horizons between the readers and the text, so they are something like alive. as with a work of art, that in between space is way more vital and interesting than original meaning or intent. by regarding any kind of appropriation as a corruption of something pure i think we kind of surrender a lot of the value of an ancient organism like a book that provides access to the innermost thoughts and feelings of *specific users* in *clearly identified interpretive communities* because they considered the meaning of their very existance through this book.

You can be religious, or you can have an interest in culture/intelligent-discussion/idunnowhatrewecallingtheworldthatilxcaresabout?. The mingling of the two is a strange fire and water trick to some people I meet.

idk Haela-Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix might like a word? like the most overtly religious art that gets a lot of "hipster kisses" is enough of a counter argument by itself, maybe- A Love Supreme, God Only Knows, obv you don't have to actually be religious to appreciate religious art, that in fact the values of our "specific interpretive community" have to meet the art. but if you really want to bury your head in the sand there is still some ineffable spirituality about certain artworks and cultural artifacts that our comfortable modern context can't just conveniently neutralize, it has to be reckoned with.
and i even wonder if there might be a remotely-Christian aspect to e.g. the feelings a lot of us have about the reflexive indifference poor people constantly face & with which they are regarded - "No room at the inn". just calling youself an atheist or not having spiritual beliefs doesn't automatically sever your ties with the lineage and influence of religious interpretive communities because we aren't separate.

Someone's been reading their Gadamer lol. I agree though: it's a funny idea to apply the death of the author to the Bible, but at least from the Christian perspective, if the Bible ain't *interpreted* then it's a dead book like any other dead book. Religious texts gain their meaning when they are engaged by their (always contemporary) readers. The beauty and chaos of a changing faith is that it actually wrestles with its text. That wrestle can lead to awful consequences like genocidal justification or anti-semitism, but it can also lead to beauty like emancipation or radical forgiveness/generosity. Obviously the Bible, or any text, is not entirely what we make it. We're not radical relativists. It (and everything) has a substance, a sache, but any engagement with it is always going to be a partnering of today and the text.

I'm not saying religion and art has no overlap, I'm not that silly! Just making a generalization that the ilx temperament of unrestrained cultural digestion and critique is not typically partnered with active religious practice

I dunno if socialists would appreciate your suggestion that care for the poor is tied to the culturally religious history they have been born into. Whether right or wrong, don't think you'll win anyone over with that direct line of thought

You can be religious, or you can have an interest in culture/intelligent-discussion/idunnowhatrewecallingtheworldthatilxcaresabout?. The mingling of the two is a strange fire and water trick to some people I meet.

idk Haela-Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix might like a word?

whatever it is that she's doing certainly _seems_ like a strange fire and water trick from where i set, haha. i'm not totally unversed in christianity but i gotta say _93696_ means a lot more to me as art than it does as theology! i do see whatever she's doing as sharing basically nothing with, say, "awesome god".

in all realness my trouble with believing in the Christian God has been, if what he and his Son said are so important, why has he been ok with letting everybody fuck up the message so badly for the last 2,000 years, like...for a long time the two of them are stage managing everything, and then just disappear forever and in some cases the Biblical canon is still in dispute!

old religious like the Bible are constantly evolving through a fusion of horizons between the readers and the text, so they are something like alive. as with a work of art, that in between space is way more vital and interesting than original meaning or intent. by regarding any kind of appropriation as a corruption of something pure i think we kind of surrender a lot of the value of an ancient organism like a book that provides access to the innermost thoughts and feelings of *specific users* in *clearly identified interpretive communities* because they considered the meaning of their very existance through this book.

i mean it does come back to robert wyatt to me so often, "god song". "god song" captures something really important about my approach to religion, which is very much "what the fuck, god?" all the shit i hear people say. if "god don't make no junk", why the hell did i need to get an orchi? i'm with neando here. you know why i hate the christian god? not enough fucking _smiting_. people for 2000 years have been using him as a pretext for practicing hatred and violence against queer people. and what the fuck has god done about that? nothing. he is _responsible_ for what people do in his name, or he is dead, or both. either way, you ask me if i want to attack and dethrone god? you betcha. why the hell _wouldn't_ i? this is a being i should love, i should respect, i should _revere_ and _worship_? i mean, god, i love bill fay, but his existence, his deep, profound, meaningful faith, doesn't erase the unremitting abuse christianity has perpetrated in so many ways, so many forms, over the course of my life, doesn't negate the fact that christianity _still_ perpetrates that abuse from the highest places.

if we storm heaven, if we attack and dethrone god, is that bill fay's god? has he had anything taken from him? i don't know. i trust bill fay to take care of himself and those he loves. i see no reason to believe that i wouldn't be one of the ones he loves. bill fay, he's one of the ones i love, and i love him for his faith, and yet i hate god, and i hate christianity, and i want to see... i don't want to see the churches burned, but i want to see the abuse the churches perpetrate _stopped_. i love bill fay and i accept that he thinks of himself as a christian and that word means _nothing_ to me, in the sense in which he uses the term. that's a him thing.

i don't know if any of that makes sense. religion is one of those things, god is one of those things, the more i look at it the more it dissolves into incoherence.

xp Oh, i know absolutely nothing about Christianity tbc! it's more likely the other way around.

Just making a generalization that the ilx temperament of unrestrained cultural digestion and critique is not typically partnered with active religious practice

got it. i don't know of anyone else on ilx whose religious or spiritual practice is the central thing in their life, but who knows? and "unrestrained cultural digestion and critique" is not me, i only listen to 5 or 6 records. maybe you're onto something.

Kate i was writing a response to one of your earlier posts in my initial post and it was taking way too long and i had to abort, hopefully to return. Sorry :(

I have lived and worked in neo-pagan/witch spaces and there were a lot of Queer people of Christian backgrounds who i love who were and are still deeply wounded by the church the communities and barely made it out alive and i get it.

I have to go to work RIGHT NOW :(

my spiritual practice is hormones and mushrooms

is that anything?

if I frame it as consuming the body of christ as part of my christian worship it makes it sound more legit doesn't it? like I'm not just fucking around? even though I probably take my sacraments more seriously than the average church goer does when they eat the thing

I was raised with religion as a thing you had to do for some reason but were a mug if you actually fell for it. so that's where I'm coming from. but I do want to actually fall for the thing. I always did. not the christian thing but the thing that you surrender to and it all opens up

and whatever it is it's kind of indifferent to concepts like "good" and "bad" and "me" and "you" and "life" and "death" in a way that is awesome and scary and beautiful and all the other adjectives

Christianity in its infancy, with its lack of canon and dogma, was far more interesting. people actually believed Old Testament God and New Testament God were warring Gods and New Testament God kicked the old one's ass to save the world from him

(it is not exactly hard to understand why they might have believed that, God from Old Testament to New Testament was like Willie Mays Hays being played by Omar Epps instead of Wesley Snipes in Major League 2)

haha I get references

everything becomes boring once people decide what it is

that seems to be when they get violent too

or maybe the violence is an attempt to force the divine into a shape that the kind of people who run empires approve of which is not very nice for most people but then it's all they have left to appeal to regarding their condition so

I have lived and worked in neo-pagan/witch spaces and there were a lot of Queer people of Christian backgrounds who i love who were and are still deeply wounded by the church the communities and barely made it out alive and i get it.

― Deflatormouse

i know you get it... queer perspective on, like, particularly christianity is so fundamentally different from non-queer because of the trauma christianity has caused so many of us and because despite that the belief, the faith, it _means_ something to us. not the doctrines, the thing it's trying to describe. like there's a couple of ways people are talking about religion here, i'm not saying either is right or wrong, but there's:

On the macro level, the various ways of speculating about multiple universes are mind-blowing.

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux)

and then there's:

my spiritual practice is hormones and mushrooms

is that anything?

― Left

i spent a _lot of time_ immersed in the former and these days i'm a lot closer to the latter. oh by the way left yes, that is something, grats on the mones, they're awesome, and uh for future reference personally i love ilx but i don't find it necessarily complements any entheogenic experiences i might or might not have.

if I frame it as consuming the body of christ as part of my christian worship it makes it sound more legit doesn't it? like I'm not just fucking around? even though I probably take my sacraments more seriously than the average church goer does when they eat the thing

― Left

like i was talking about this last month in a, uh, contextually inappropriate space, contextual appropriateness is a challenge for me sometimes but seriously there is a huge overlap between a lot the ways people talk about religion and my queer experience, me saying "you look the same to me, i grew tits" isn't just a line. there has been this deep inner change that's been part of my transition, one that is immeasurably greater than softer skin and so forth. when the matrix came out my second oldest brother was like "bah this is just the allegory of the cave with bullet time", twenty years later i reminded him of this and said "so yeah it's pretty obviously a trans allegory not a plato thing" and he said "who's to say plato wasn't trans?" which is annoying mostly because he was right. and with neoplatonism being the philosophical foundation of pauline christianity...

but i'm _not_ a christian, i don't look at it from a christian perspective and mostly that's because of what deflatormouse was saying, christianity has deeply wounded me, christianity for the entirety of my life, and as far as i can tell for its entire history, has hated queerness. my... this is not facts, this is feelings, but i feel like queerness was here first, it was ours, it was our birthright, and religion comes into the garden and takes it and says "no, we are the outsiders, we are the ones who don't fit, all those feelings you have, it's about our divine god and about our moral principles and not about your deep-seated _queerness_. the church is the only place that will accept your gay ass, we are life, outside us is death." that's how i feel about christianity, how i feel like they've acted. and i am outside now, an it is only death insofar as they keep trying to destroy us to prove their point. it is vast and terrifying and nameless and beautiful.

when people who haven't done it think about GRS they have all of these ideas and conceptions about it and it's nameless, wordless, impossible to explain to those who haven't been through it, what it means and what it _doesn't_ mean. that yes it hurts and that physical pain is the smallest part of it. i was reading my fears before GRS and it was me saying things like that it would be the worst pain i'd ever experienced, which it wasn't. what GRS was for me was, perhaps the ultimate form of embodiment for me. by which i mean that dissociation was that my body didn't feel like _my body_, it was this meat puppet, this fleshsack that i walked around in, something i would rather have done without. and i start taking these... i can talk about the change in scientific terms but it's so at variance with everything i ever learned about the world and my body that it genuinely does seem more accurate to describe it as _magic_, to describe E as a _reagent_ (particularly when the endos don't ever do the fucking research to figure out what the hormones actually do). and the apotheosis of that, what i might describe as _transsubstantiation_, came after the surgery when i was in the shower for the first time and gently cleaning the area.

i have never had the experience of carrying and giving birth to a child, never will, so i can't say how similar what i felt was, but from the way i've heard it described, my experience _felt_ similar. newborn babies, they aren't pretty, i wouldn't say. one is polite and says how pretty they are and they're red screaming and in pain. the same way, i never really thought of genitals, any genitals, as being "beautiful" before, and here for the first time i see it and i say "my god, it is so beautiful", even though it's, i mean, i've seen the pictures, it's swollen, red, painful. there was lots of blood. there was lots of blood, and i said to myself, out loud, "this is my body, this is my blood", and it seemed real and true for the first time. my body felt like my body. my blood felt like my blood. not christ's. _mine_.

so i am not a christian, although i am inspired by a lot of what i have learned from christianity. i am not a christian because christianity took my body, my amazing queer body, from me, and i have taken it back. and science and craft and art, all of these things go into it, and i acknowledge them, and what also went into it was something i can only describe as _magic_. it's something i have experienced, it's real, and people can come up with all kinds of explanations for it, just like they came up with all kinds of explanations for gender, and they seem reasonable and they make sense and they're, at best, inadequate. at best, they fall short.

Going back a bit to darraghmac, yeah sure everything people do can technically be classified as nature.

I am sometimes inclined toward that point of view. But bear in mind that it makes the following words meaningless: artificial, man-made, synthetic, anthropogenic.

There are a lot of people who wish to preserve those words and the distinctions they represent. I don't know what to tell those people. If everything a human does is natural, then there is no way to ever call anything unnatural ever again.

Again, I am fine with that, but I am sure there are people out there who would like to distinguish between the general category of human actions/creations (like, say, Los Angeles or religion) vs. slime molds, algae, and the migration of the wildebeests.

Sorry if that sounds extreme - to clarify, if you want to define everything humans do or have done as a _subset_ of "natural" then there is no semantic quarrel.

In this view, Greater London is nature. The internet is nature. Cruise ships are naturally occurring phenomena.

If everything a human does is natural, then there is no way to ever call anything unnatural ever again.

Now you're getting it.

Greater London is nature. The internet is nature. Cruise ships are naturally occurring phenomena.

Sure. What's a skyscraper if not a termite mound for humans?

A question that I'm thinking about a lot lately is the level of consciousness (as humans understand it) at which point the urge to alter one's appearance comes into play. Like, animals put on elaborate sexual displays (in almost every other species it's the males trying to appeal to the females, which is worth thinking about too), but they don't change their appearance to do it — like, you don't see a bear scraping off its fur, or a bird plucking out its feathers, to be "prettier". So clearly there's some kind of threshold of consciousness at which point the animal (human being) becomes aware of, and dissatisfied with, its physical form. And sometimes that escalates/evolves into "I am angry at the god that made me this way."