ILX Religiosity and Spirituality and Agnosticity and Atheicity Poll

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...

xp hmm dmac i understand your point as to a binary belief/unbelief tho.

I think it is more not one, and not two.

as to binaries, i enjoyed the book the knowledge machine re the nonexistent philosophy of science, the binary essence of science, and the mystery of compartmentalization in the human psychology.

My preferred way of describing myself is "not religious." That includes not believing in any supernatural deity, but it also means I'm not part of any cultural faith tradition, I don't participate in ritual worship, religion is just not part of how I interact with the world or other people. I'm not on the fence about it, I'm not waiting for or seeking revelation, and I'm also not all worked about telling people they're wrong or dumb for believing in whatever they believe. I just don't do religion, it's not a lens on the universe that I find personally resonant. My greatest sympathies are with the Buddhism I was raised in, conceptually a lot of Buddhism makes sense to me (to the extent I understand as a non-practitioner), and if you combine Zen with existentialism you get pretty close to where I sit on the spectrum, but it would be an insult to actual Buddhists for me to call myself one.

This me tho I was not raised in Buddhism

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.

Alan Watts drew a distinction between "faith" and "belief" that I have found very useful in thinking about things for which there is no proof and could never be any proof. For Watts having "faith" rests purely on a simple attitude of trust, not derived through rationality in any way, whereas a "belief" is tied to a definite statement about truth which cannot be proved, but which then supports a framework of consequent and subsidiary truths.

For example, a belief in the inerrancy of the Bible is not subject to proof, but supports a vast series of consequent beliefs such as those elaborated by St. Thomas Aquinas for Catholics or the various systems embraced by fundamentalist Protestants. In contrast, faith is typified by unprovable, but simple tenets such as "god is good' or 'love thy neighbor' and even then the 'article of faith' need not be reduced even to such simple statements. The attitude of trusting faith exists apart from the words that express it. It is incorporated into the person who manifests it.

The zen-ness of this idea is typical of Watts, but I find it throws light on the deeper zones of religion you can't grasp through quarrels about the specifics of various churches or religious credos. Such abiding and amorphous faith is also much harder to corrupt into petty arrogance and hatred.

Any reading recs from his oeuvre?

I like one of Watt's earliest books, when he was still as much of an anglican as a freelance Zen buddhist: The Wisdom of Insecurity. It's one of his more accessible for more Christian-attuned than Zen-attuned readers. His most accessible Zen book is The Way of Zen. Another strange, challenging but not always successful one (still worthwhile) is The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are.

To me the afterlife is the origin point of all religions, since the obliteration of ones own consciousness is impossible to imagine in first person, therefore for our own sanity we latch onto some concept of “continuation”. Religions formed as explanations, expanding on that original idea of hypothesizing exactly which supernatural circumstances exist to facilitate it.

wow. i don't think that is wrong, but meself i long for the obliteration of my consciousness. though not here at all. but i cannot imagine that longing for continuation. i mean, don't call suicide hotline, that is not what i mean. i am not brave enough for it, and many would be horribly hurt.

not even joking. my idea of hell, i suppose, is exactly what all these eternal consciousness sv morans are seeking.

that seems a lot to leave out there. but anyhoo, one of, if not the sole, persuasive religious arguments to me is that many many people objectively and obviously smarter persons than myself BELIEVE. i'm like, well, i must be missing it, or "god" is withholding more than a little by way of useful signification.

it may be the ONLY reason i'm AGNOSTIC. dmac. :)

Same for the other side though. I dont think intelligence and religious sensibilities have a correlation

yeah i'm doubtful there are types of intelligence really. there are types of knowledge and interest, they vary. but processing speed and information, that's real. the rest is prejudice and interest.

fuck, i am not sure i sound like who i am here. i'm an english major attorney type. or maybe i sound precisely like who i am. it is hard to deceive, you know.

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

I don't believe in god, but the only solace I would feel if I were wrong is that maybe I would personally get to tell this psycho to fuck off.

i dont think agnostic is a thing

― close encounters of the third knid (darraghmac)

i'm not sure if being an agnostic is a thing or not

i'd say it's less that i don't _know_ whether or not god exists than that i truly genuinely don't care. what does it matter? what possible difference is it going to make in my life?

The epistemology is salient for those who care about epistemology.

I am probably getting a bit too old for it but I am still mildly interested.

To Kate, not caring is a perfectly reasonable position. You can safely pursue your life and your interests without a definitive answer about the nature of divinity. Most people have done precisely that for thousands of years.

Yeah, that was until they were called up to be sacrificed to the volcano God though

does the volcano god top

wow. i don't think that is wrong, but meself i long for the obliteration of my consciousness. though not here at all. but i cannot imagine that longing for continuation. i mean, don't call suicide hotline, that is not what i mean. i am not brave enough for it, and many would be horribly hurt.

not even joking. my idea of hell, i suppose, is exactly what all these eternal consciousness sv morans are seeking.

― a single gunshot and polite applause (Hunt3r), Sunday, February 11, 2024 6:32 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

This is the tricky thing though - the obliteration of ones own consciousness means it's an outcome that's impossible to desire first hand. You're clearly talking about the dread of an eternal continuation but you're framing the conceptualization of that in a human way too, imagining the boredom and loneliness perhaps or other human intellectual / time-awareness dependent experiences, and here's the exact line of thinking that creates a religion as we start to talk about various hypothetical circumstances of this magical existence beyond our human form. "What is it like" is impossible to answer; either we go through that exercise of developing a religious theory with our imaginations, or we accept that our consciousness is truly obliterated which can't be "like" anything at all first hand.

It's hard for me to conceive of someone longing for the permanent, total and irreversible obliteration of their consciousness, i.e. existence, but if someone is capable of it, it must be a very enlightened state of mind.

Total consciousness obliteration -- that happens when we sleep, though? The micro-sleep enthusiasts are less comprehensible to me than the "I wanna live forever" crews. Sleep is great!

Yeah, sleep is great. Death, not so much.

evan i dont see what at all is impossible at the start of your post and none of the rest follows

longing for death and death being the end forever is prob weird

generally believing it is easy

Impossible first hand. You can understand what it means in the abstract but you have to exist to experience the outcome of the thing you desire.

how does that make the desire for it impossible

I would not miss me, but I believe at least some other folks might.

My family would have a very tough time without my income and labor. Enough depends on me that I could not vanish even if I wanted to (and yeah, there have certainly been times when I kinda wouldn't mind vanishing; existence is sometimes tough).

Nevertheless I think Heraclitus had a bit to say about this - for a long time, before you were born, you didn't exist. Was that difficult? N9, it wasn't. Because you weren't aware of it. When you return to nonexistent status, it should feel exactly the same.

The wreckage you leave behind is a separate topic.

Nevertheless I think Heraclitus had a bit to say about this - for a long time, before you were born, you didn't exist. Was that difficult? N9, it wasn't. Because you weren't aware of it. When you return to nonexistent status, it should feel exactly the same.

I mean, this is how I've always comforted myself and come to terms with the fact that I don't believe there's anything else out there. I won't matter because you won't know.

*it* not *I*. Clearly I will always matter.

Thought all the new answers might be about Marky Mark's latest tack right:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-U1TyEr4IE

Removing yourself from existence in order to relieve yourself from the suffering it causes makes about as much sense as sparring a character in a movie from their troubles by destroying the film reel and saying they're "at peace now". The "solution" is irrelevant to the person looking for one. Only those around you that continue to exist get to experience the outcome.

Anyway I brought all this up because I was talking about where I believe religious belief originates AKA rationalizing the hows and whys of an afterlife / continuation of consciousness.

Why not consider religious belief came from religious behavior instead of the other way around? like marky mark may essentially have no beliefs at all but being raised a certain way had to find some way to reconcile that.

I think that's something different from what I'm saying. I'm just talking about the line of thought from which religions originally developed.

For a long discussion about how ilxors view death, see also: Fear of death.

"The "solution" is irrelevant to the person looking for one"

ever more bizarre tbh