ILX Religiosity and Spirituality and Agnosticity and Atheicity Poll

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."

it makes the following words meaningless: artificial, man-made, synthetic, anthropogenic

you might want to give that a bit more thought. most things that fit into one broad category can also fit into a sub-category. the fact that birds are animals doesn't make the word avian meaningless.

Aimless, pleas see the subsequent post. I am okay with subcategories. It's just really bad semantics.

Also interesting digression, unperson.

There are fun topics about how sexual selection and natural selection work together in lockstep. Peacocks (or whomsoever) get longer and more resplendent tails (or whatever), but there is a point at which it just becomes stupid because you can't move. Desmond Morris and Jared Diamond to thread.

It is interesting that you bring up human consciousness and agency in this context. A peacock doesn't decide to have a more colorful tail. A middle-aged human male can decide to buy a fancier car.

Perhaps the topic is getting a bit far from religion at this point. But yeah, if there is a God in the traditional sense, He/She clearly doesn't care about us being lost and confused about our relationships with ourselves and one another. Or He/She wants us to figure it out on our own. Which is cool, I was gonna try and do that anyway.

So what use is He/She anyway? They didn't intervene in the 1860s or 1940s. They aren't intervening now. If it's a guy? Fuck that guy.

the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him

that's me in as much as God is the patriarchy (the ultimate dad/boss/cop/king)

Kate I love your embodied love so much I think that kind of thing (whatever it is) is my actual religion

Milo: "if."

wow <3 <3
beautiful post Kate

I remember Barry Scwabsky saying something in a review of a video art installation about how "pretty" is the exclusive domain of the young, and older people are left to investigate the beautiful and the sublime. I think of that often.

a lot of what's been called Christian "theatre" itt seems designed to be humbling and that can be really wonderful and beautiful in the way gyac's post describes and i have enjoyed the privilege of experiencing it as an outsider without being confined by the doctrine in any way other than through indirect cultural osmosis. Witchcraft nowadays is usually framed in terms of "empowerment" and drawing and harnessing power for obv reasons, but i suspect also in part because this sets it up in opposition to Christian humility. It is also washing away the histories of oppression by pagan religions, and subtracting all the horror, the vulnerability to terrifying malevolent agents and spirits in the traditions it draws from. If this is a healthier version of religion, great, but of interest maybe re: the question raised upthread about whether belief is chosen (i do not think there is a simple answer). Personally I really like the idea of a Robert Wyatt-like god who is frail and delicate and sensitive and compassionate, wounded and wise. I would choose a god who embodies many of the qualities of Robert Wyatt. Fuck omnipotence.

I think the natural:mad-made dichotomy is an important acknowledgement of humankind's limitations, intellectual and otherwise. It expersses, idk, the limits in our understanding of design systems in nature, our shortsigntedness- like once you recognize that humans are part of nature, these terms become more useful imo, not less.

i have a friend who makes art that tries to recreate the intricate beauty that ordinarily results from biological processes... he talks a lot about how he would never be able to copy something like that freehand, that he has to first understand the process and then create a genative system(?) or whatever along similar lines...

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.

*exactly*
at least, that's what i've noticed in a lot of people coming to occult religions and practices from Christianity, they need an outlet for that faith without the dogma and the doctrine... but a lot of the time they apply something of a Christian framework. not a moral or dogmatic framework, but i generally have no trouble picking out who grew up Christian and who grew up secular according to how they parse material (the key thing is maybe that those fron Christian backgrounds will often embrace diverse interpretive traditions and find meaning in reconciling their disparities into a cohesive whole, where secular kids will be eager to separate them out).

Cristian love as it applies to queers and other groups (the faithless) AIUI sometimes = we love you for the Christian you have the potential to become?

Actually i *can* think of one poster here who is Christian and queer afaik. Christianity is huge, and diverse, it might help to be circumspect and to avoid painting all Christian communities with the same brush...

idk there's a bunch of stuff here i wanted to respond to and it's too all over the place but the context for a lot of it is something i want to spell out here even though it might be too obvious or taken as a given:

like, i don't actually understand climate science. i trust in scientists because i've been conditioned to place my trust in one group over another, not because i am a rational anything or a clever bullshit detector. at the end of the day, it's because of my social connections, the circumstances i was born into. this is nothing to be smug about! and there is no reason really for the "othering" of religious people because it's all the same shit, right?

standard disclaimer about not accusing anyone in particular of smugness but it's way easier to spell it out than tie myself in knots playing whack a mole...

oh yeah, i thought about whether there are religious culture conoisseurs in my life, and of course there are. a lot of them don't talk about it much or at all in certain spaces, but some *have to* talk about it because it's what they spend a lot of their time thinking about. how these talks often start IME 'let me preemptively correct some of the misconceptions you probably have about me". the challenge isn't so much that it will encounter resistance or hostility, or even necessarily that it will be awkward and uncomfortable, it's more like when you say you are an active practitioner of x tradition you are immediately confronted with a million misconceptions about who you are and what you do, and nobody has the strength to explain away all of them. it's much easier not to bother.

the first one i usually have to correct is that i don't see myself as "religious" or "spiritual" at all, my practice is utterly devoid of any mysticism or spiritual discipline but like a lot of people who have aspergers and schizophrenia-related disorders i am "superstitious". Actually milo's "vulgar animism" is way more accurate, and that's the reason i bring it up. What this "vulgar animism" looks like day to day:
https://www.tiktok.com/@wrenwrite/video/7318431658573712670

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

― Virginia Wolfman (Ye Mad Puffin), Saturday, 10 February 2024 18:35 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

these are all naturally occurring phenomena

i went for a hike in the internet last week

attributing importance to something just because it has happened is imo a bias that needs shaking off

cannot go against nature, that's what love and rockets told me

Breaking news: the world is sometimes disagreeable

Kate I love your embodied love so much I think that kind of thing (whatever it is) is my actual religion

― Left

awww, thank you so much :purpleheart:

-

the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him

― papal hotwife (milo z)

hear me out here milo

for starters, the motherfucker gave me testicles. i absolutely could stop there. i'm a girl and _he gave me testicles_. the penis, i mean, fine i guess. i have no particular use for the product, but you know, i can see the appeal. they're great on other people. it's like stacy cay said, "penises on girls is like pineapple on pizza - it's actually really good but a lot of people are huge bitches about it". testicles on girls, though? that's not hawaiian pizza, that's fucking altoona-style pizza. now, imagine you were an altoona-style pizza. how would _you_ feel about your creator?

but you know what, that's fine. people are born all kinds of ways. people are born with a lot worse problems than just being a girl with testicles. i mean, it's pretty easy to take care of, right? a couple of snips and some hormone replacement therapy and all's right with the world. nothing to make a big deal out of, really.

except that this motherfucker has spent two thousand years telling his followers that my being a girl with testicles is somehow _my_ problem, not _his_, that i'm at fault, and because of _his_ little fuck up i'm supposed to spend my entire life with completely unnecessary crippling gender dysphoria? what the fuck, god? take a little personal responsibility here.

not only that, it turns out, haha, it turns out that i'm not the only little whoopsy-doodle god did. it turns out the world is CHOCK FUCKING FULL of girls who he went and stuck goddammn balls on, and men who he gave ovaries to and who, by the way, fucking _menstruation_, i'm sorry, how the _fuck_ is anybody going to worship a god who thought _menstruation_ was a reasonable thing to saddle human beings with? i mean as much as i hate balls, holy god menstruation is what we in tech would call "user-hostile design". don't think for a minute that i feel bad for missing out on menstruation. menstruation is clearly complete bullshit.

anyway, it turns out after a _great_ deal of _herculean_ effort the innumerable trans people finally figure out what the fuck is going on. it's pretty hard because it turns out the followers of his cockamamie word have taken over the entire world and taken over all of the other people who had not perfect but often _far more sensible_ ideas about gender than goddamn _christianity_ and just completely overwrote everything they believed with this fucking toxic bullshit. i mean, look at this shit:

"Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own."

that's a fucking cornerstone of the goddamn Christian religion, 1 Corinthians 6:19. i grew up singing motherfucking hymns about that bullshit. yeah no fucking wonder they don't like it when we start talking "bodily autonomy" and "self-determination". it's the exact opposite of everything these bastards stand for.

and that's not even getting into all the _other_ shit people do in the name of this god, do in his name without him lifting so much of a finger to stop them. i mean, again, the testicles are kind of a nitpick, really, in light of all that other shit. no, he casts his benevolent, all-seeing eye over all this and says "this is fine."

i'm supposed to give this guy a free pass because some of the people who love him and worship him have somehow turned out to be pretty cool?

nah.

-

Actually i *can* think of one poster here who is Christian and queer afaik. Christianity is huge, and diverse, it might help to be circumspect and to avoid painting all Christian communities with the same brush...

i mean i think highly of lots of people who are/were christian and queer. richard penniman. chris bell. doug pinnick. just off the top of my head. there's a long history of it, and that faith goes deep, and that faith is that profound, and the institutions who defined and inculcated that faith, i mean... i find it hard to believe it did them any favors.

i mean honestly i have mostly empathy, because like you say, one comes from this position of trauma and this position of being abused and, like... to get personal, i fucking love my mom, you know? that doesn't make what she did ok, but i still love her. to be queer and a christian, that's a special thing, because, like, in some way to be queer one also has to be _anti-christian_. either that or dismiss everybody who doesn't believe in the exact sort of christian god you believe in as heretics. like there is some value and power to truth but that's kind of a tough sell for me, you know? i don't know if i'd be easily persuaded of that.

like, i don't actually understand climate science. i trust in scientists because i've been conditioned to place my trust in one group over another, not because i am a rational anything or a clever bullshit detector. at the end of the day, it's because of my social connections, the circumstances i was born into. this is nothing to be smug about! and there is no reason really for the "othering" of religious people because it's all the same shit, right?

idk to me this is kind of a semantic argument, because there _is_, in fact, strong empirical evidence for climate science. can i personally validate all of it? no. it is social in the sense that people i trust tend to accept it, but that trust is not blind trust. it's not like, oh, i like this person, it's oh, this person consistently behaves in a competent, respectful, and trustworthy manner. i've tried over and over again to belong to all sorts of different christian communities, and all of them have lost my faith through their own actions. because they couldn't consistently behave in a competent, respectful, and trustworthy manner. because they made excuses for wrongdoing or covered up wrongdoing instead of opposing it, or misrepresented their own beliefs, or again and again acted in contradiction to the things they claimed to believe.

when i look at science, on the other hand... i see plenty of abuses, plenty of bias, plenty of misrepresentation. people talking bullshit about chromosomes and gametes. and it works because science is not based on _faith_, it is based on _evidence_, and because it makes no claims to infallibility. i've read this before - ask a creationist what will change their mind, they'll say "nothing". ask a proponent of evolution what will change their mind, they'll say "evidence". that's the difference.

I remember Barry Scwabsky saying something in a review of a video art installation about how "pretty" is the exclusive domain of the young, and older people are left to investigate the beautiful and the sublime. I think of that often.

tell you what, i'll make young people a deal - they can be beautiful and sublime, and my 48-year-old ass gets to be pretty. i think that's a fair compromise. i mean, just because i missed out on 43 years of girlhood/womanhood doesn't mean i don't have a right! :)

Orwell's embittered atheist quote isn't a critism of anyone, the post just reminded me of it - I generally think it's the most reasonable attitude to have toward the Abrahamic God. If there is an omniscient, omnipotent being that allows misery and suffering, that is necessarily an evil being.

Totally. Given omniscience and omnipotence, plus eons of time and oceans of material, THIS is the best you could do?

oh i didn't realize that was a quote, whoops

ok so imagine george orwell was an altoona-style pizza

gnosticism is hot these days now that the stoicism bros are fading along with their crypto fortunes

yeah dick made gnosticism sound way cooler than it is, most of the original source texts are motherfuckers acting like they're OT VIII and talking like that means they get to treat everyone else like a Suppressive Person, saying shit like "well see the reason people don't understand the inner truth we do is because they're not real people at all, they're just bits of string made by the demiurge and have no souls of their own"

that said my most surprising realization of the last couple years is that "auditing" was actually a good idea and works, as far as i know no gnostics ever came up with the idea of auditing tho

in trans terms, the closest thing i know of to gnosticism is the "feminine essence" theory, also called in the past "internal hermaphrodite" or "uranian" (great wikipedia quote: "in a broader definition there were also American Uranians." missed a trick in not going with "Uranian-Americans", tho.) i toyed with it for a while, the idea that my external form was a false manifestation of my inner, hidden nature. hell, more than toyed with it, i believed it for a while. i don't now. i don't think i was born a woman. i do think i was born queer, but that was never exactly a "hidden nature", it was an overt nature that i learned to hide because it was actively punished.

i don't blame transfemmes who make sense out of things by concluding that they have a "female essence", as long as they don't say cis people are made out of string and have no souls.

isn't the uranian thing related to the whole *fucking weird sorry* trend among upper class homosexual men of spiritual veneration of the purity and innocence of pederasty, in contrast to dirty vulgar plebian sex between men or with women?

the divine feminine stuff feels terfy to me when cis women do it but I guess it's fine for transfemmes if they need it

I would be really down for a satanism where his/their nonbinary and hermaphroditic and poly/pan nature was taken seriously and not just used for shock value but I've never come across it, probably exists online somewhere

isn't the uranian thing related to the whole *fucking weird sorry* trend among upper class homosexual men of spiritual veneration of the purity and innocence of pederasty, in contrast to dirty vulgar plebian sex between men or with women?

the 19th century thing, yeah, it's fucking hard to talk about because the number one thing that gets said about queer people is that we're "groomers" and child abusers - you know, DARVO shit. but then i look at queer history, both in upper-class victorian times and classical antiquity, and pederasty was actively valorized by a lot of these folks

i guess in some ways it's not terribly different from respecting, say, germaine greer as a feminist thinker, but daaaaaaaaaamn.

that's one of the things that makes queerness so _complicated_ for me, all the interplay between gender, presentation, age, role, and _some_ of those stereotypes - not the pederastic ones - do have a basis in reality. a lot of these labels and boundaries do seem arbitrary but there are some people you kinda want out of your movement. that's one of the things that really inspires me about early christianity, honestly, the question of setting boundaries in radical community. like paul at some point has to explain in a letter that no, not being bound by the law doesn't mean that you can fuck your mom. that's what i see in paul's epistles, navigating radical community boundaries, and a lot of that is him being disingenuous and outright lying, and i guess having seen "framing agnes" last night that's on my mind as well.

the most difficult thing i encounter is that masc = top and femme = bottom isn't just, like, a social construct. in practice i've found there's something more to it. that's something that jules gill-peterson talks about in her new book, femmes behaving in femme ways get accused of perpetuating the patriarchy.

anyway all that's a little far afield so to bring it back to topic, the abrahamic god is definitely the ultimate big dick daddy dom, and is just as repulsive as the rest of them.

I would be really down for a satanism where his/their nonbinary and hermaphroditic and poly/pan nature was taken seriously and not just used for shock value but I've never come across it, probably exists online somewhere

― Left

it's kinda weird in the us because that schism like where you had around the 19th century us civil war, where you had the baptists who were anti-slavery and the southern baptists who were pro-slavery, has kind of replicated itself in a bunch of different organizations. so in america you have the church of satan, who are fash, and the satanic temple, who are radical leftists show show up at pride every year with buttons saying "SATAN RESPECTS PRONOUNS" and are generally made far more welcome than the christian groups who started showing up, like, last year and who feebly insist that "god loves all people". that's great, meantime half my gen z friends are using "it/its" pronouns, i mean, fuck it, if that's how people are gonna treat you anyway, go with it, right?

anyway i got queer friends who've joined the satanic temple. satan definitely has a much better reputation around these parts than christianity, and it's generally done in an extremely queer context. you also see some of that in transfem black metal. but there's a lot of overlap with groups like "witches vs. patriarchy".

that said the other thing about satanism is that it's not, like, heavily doctrinally orthodox. if somebody's taking baphomet as intersex seriously, it's gonna be a personal thing. i'm sure there are furries who see baphomet through a certain lens, and i think that's cool too. i don't personally, not being a furry.

Jesus kate I love your posts on this thread. I dreamed about this thread! I'm so glad it exists!

I am not participating due to the rather-personal relationship I have with "my faith" (see Matthew 6:6), also I can't keep up with you all, love being able to spectate tho

How well-organized are they? I keep coming across stuff like this:
https://www.ktvb.com/article/news/local/idaho-press/resolution-could-allow-public-fundsreligious-schools-put-on-pause/277-90a9884e-ea1a-4345-a67f-528661357622

They really feel more visibly effective than a lot of very well funded legal activist groups! I can't recall the last time the ACLU made headlines.

anyway i got queer friends who've joined the satanic temple. satan definitely has a much better reputation around these parts than christianity, and it's generally done in an extremely queer context. you also see some of that in transfem black metal. but there's a lot of overlap with groups like "witches vs. patriarchy".

How could they not? Satan's bad-ass.

https://i.imgur.com/2Ym5IR8.jpg

Jesus kate I love your posts on this thread. I dreamed about this thread! I'm so glad it exists!

I am not participating due to the rather-personal relationship I have with "my faith" (see Matthew 6:6), also I can't keep up with you all, love being able to spectate tho

― a hyperlink to the past (flamboyant goon tie included)

i fucking love you being here even to that extent because fuck yeah matthew 6:6! the idea that "religious community" comes from a guy who said _that_... the thing that bugs me most about a lot of atheism is they will look at the bible and talk about its internal contradictions as an argument against it. i'm the exact opposite! i love that the "prince of peace" "comes to bring not peace, but a sword". i love that the being at the root of "family values" rejected his birth family in favor of his chosen family. i love that in john, jesus at gethsemane fucking _subtweets_ the way the jesus of the synoptic gospels behaved at gethsemane. i love that genesis has two different origin stories back to back right at the beginning. i love that the "monotheistic god" of the tanakh is a composite of two different gods (El and JHVH). the christian bible is complicated and rich and contradicts itself and says so much about who we _are_. it's not actually the beginning and the end for me, the alpha and the omega, but christianity is so important to my life in so many ways, great and terrible. it's borderline personality disorder: the religion. it's faith and void and even if i put it away it's not like i never take it back out.

How could they not? Satan's bad-ass.

lonely lightbringer just thinkin bout things

I have a Baphomet tatt and a buncha Baphomet action figures/necklaces, and while a large part of that is "overgrown manchild collecting evil iconography cos it looks cool btw SLAYER RULES", the secondary and possibly now primary purpose is the feeling of a need to revel against the perverted nature that Christianity has taken for decades in my country. I just feel the need to say "fuck you" to that, all the time.

I'm not anti-religion, and probably 35% of my friends and family are Christian, but not the distorted, awful kind. No transphobes, homophobes, etc.

But I had an extreme aversion to religion from my youth that kinda made me unable to see the parts of it that I liked any longer. I talk about the Fundies I used to hang with, but honestly they weren't the worst. They gave me tons of laughs because they were mostly dumb, they weren't one of the more virulent Fundies sects, they had little influence, and were just old nerds. Don't get me wrong, they were the ones who finally pushed me over the edge, but they didn't start the fire (sorry).

But the time I spent in Methodist churches and other more liberal sects was also bad. My Methodist Church was full of some of the worst people. Their kids were bullies who tormented me in Sunday School, while they themselves were often smug hypocrites.

They treated religion like some kind of spiritual Lysol, where they just had to tick off boxes like attending church once a month and would be absolved of their shitty behavior and could go back to being bad people with impunity.

It was also there that I learned you could be a complete shit bag your whole life, ask for forgiveness on your death bed, and get to Heaven. This, of course, is not at all what I was taught in Fundies church - they basically said "you can be a good person your whole life but um Heaven has a low acceptance rate, so try not to fuck up too much and also you can't beg forgiveness and keep making the same mistakes over and over".

They of course said this out of one side of their mouth while talking about the evils of homosexuality out of the other, but at least they took their beliefs seriously.

Methodists were casual, treating church like this thing you do when you're bored, but if you do it, you get to be smug about what a better person you are than everyone else.

Prime example was this dude I saw on social media years later, whose Instagram signature was "Not perfect, but made that way by the one person who is", and he was posting actual threats of violence to people, calling them cunts or slurs, real edgelord shit. That's how religion was at the Methodist church I attended. A license to be hateful.

All of this of course misses the entire point of the religion. There's a lot taught in modern religion that I outright do not agree with, but it's hard to deny many of the stores and general messages are indeed beautiful. Jesus himself was basically punk rock as fuck. He taught a radical message, they threatened him, he refused to back down, and they killed him for insurrection against the evil government.

He wasn't a rock star when he died. He was the Nick Drake of his time, his popularity only really skyrocketed after he died and his stories circulated.

That's cool! Then his followers decided he'd be more interesting if he was Eddie Money and began offering everyone two tickets to paradise and created a new religion around him, one that felt more like a Little League rulebook than a philosophy of the way to live life.

And that's why I can't get with it, because dogma just ruins everything.

huh. i keep boiling it down to are these claims literally TRUE? and if they are not true, what does that necessarily prove or imply?

can i get better, without getting soaked in that mess? i am not very smart or insightful as to many issues claimed by adherents, but you may correctly guess where that seems to leave me.

I mean there is that angle to. If religion is sold to you as a rulebook and btw these things all happened as written, stands to reason people will respond "you sure?"

Whereas if you come at it more from a philosophical perspective, that may not matter to you as much.

I get no value from it under either rubric rn

love that the being at the root of "family values" rejected his birth family in favor of his chosen family.

otm and I've absorbed this lesson

yeah,rulebook like. several systems worked they way thru by saying WAIT THERE’s MORE— an AFTERLIFE. and them they get you to behave with reql ppl by the rulebook out of self interest.

but if the mission of the religion right here is to make you better and happier HERE, and the rest of that shit if real is sorta incidental. well, that’s more persuasive to me at least. and who wouldn’t want to be happier here, while being truthful as far as you can tell to others?

i fund evangelizing v sus generally, this is more like, here’s my dilemma “to an extent.”

“holy” typos. good luck understanding that sorry

I, too, decided a long time back that the only sensible way to deal with the possibility of an afterlife is to file it under "no way to know, no reason to decide, not relevant to how I live my life". I'm going to die. I'll just figure it out when my last synapse fires.

I have a Baphomet tatt and a buncha Baphomet action figures/necklaces, and while a large part of that is "overgrown manchild collecting evil iconography cos it looks cool btw SLAYER RULES", the secondary and possibly now primary purpose is the feeling of a need to revel against the perverted nature that Christianity has taken for decades in my country. I just feel the need to say "fuck you" to that, all the time.

Back when I was masking regularly (cloth mask over N95), the cloth mask I wore had a big ol' Baphomet pentagram, runes 'n' all, on the front.

but if the mission of the religion right here is to make you better and happier HERE, and the rest of that shit if real is sorta incidental. well, that’s more persuasive to me at least. and who wouldn’t want to be happier here, while being truthful as far as you can tell to others?

but

atheism

is just not believing in a god

i mean we're miles away from that when ppl start saying "i get value from aspects of my/a religion"

hmm not sure i gather, but i was tryna point out that if your "religion" is not supernatural dependent and also is reasonably focused on how you feel and what you do right here, and doesn't require you to like say things that are reasonably quite untrue, if not factually proveably untrue, that's more for me.

with respect to atheism, yes, it is just not believing in a god. i don't see reasonable support for it myself, i guess i consider myself a non-theist or agnostic, not that it means a lot different to those who care.

as a thomas myself, i'd say the apostle did not doubt enough, but then at least he is alleged to have had direct evidence.

i think in fairness i need to pay more heed to the "religiosity" notednin the very thread title

i dont think agnostic is a thing

sorry agnostics

you either believe an unprovable or you dont

you cant think your way to being outside the belief question

hmm not sure i gather, but i was tryna point out that if your "religion" is not supernatural dependent and also is reasonably focused on how you feel and what you do right here, and doesn't require you to like say things that are reasonably quite untrue, if not factually proveably untrue, that's more for me.

That's not a religion; that's a philosophy. The key to religion is believing in things that are imaginary/magical/supernatural, IMO. Everything else can be sorted out through logic, evidence, inference, etc. Once the element of "faith" (in the sense that there is no proof, could never be any proof, but you believe anyway), that's when you're dealing with religion.

I think there are plenty of things that one can believe which are not provably true, but upon which one believes because they are good models for practice.

whether it goes over the line into religion or not, I suppose that depends on other factors as well. if it comes to believing in the insights of persons who had, in your opinion, very superior levels of understanding, yet still without an ability to be proved because they are unprovable, I would likely say that’s functionally a religion.

I think many people would like to believe that something like Zen Buddhism is not a religion, but it’s substantially more things than a philosophy, and more than what I described above. I understand it is definitely a religion. There are plenty of supernatural things being described in there to my understanding, but more as principles than as miracles. There are many things presented which are factual, but offered to describe deeper understandings which confuses the matter for many people. Including me.

i dont disagree with a lot of that

the science of what we understand about the universe through science and inference is close to that for me and is a very important grounding source for me in that vein at times

I got the sense that Satanists were nominally atheists, though? And surely religious enough to qualify in the tax-exempt sense, and probably bona fide sense too.

To the extent academia operates as a priesthood, it also seems functionally a religion to me, with all the attendant squabbles, abuses of power, neophytes asked to work for free, etc...