ILX Religiosity and Spirituality and Agnosticity and Atheicity Poll

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

Not to make Marky Mark an exemplar of human civilization but...

Upthread about peacocks:

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.

Why not carry that over to building monuments and behaviors that counterintuitively provide a group survival advantage, and conjecture that religious theory came after? Like the artifacts and rituals came first, then the theory, then the feedback loop. From the POV that peacock feathers are a sign of health and vitality rather than from the POV it signifies an avoidance of death, why not view religious origins as emphasizing boasted strength and fertility rather than more singularly a means to cope with death?

Basically religious origins: more midlife crisis than teen angst -- why not?

Marky Mark’s burger place is actually really good

religion and the origins of it are as much about explaining the mystery of life as the mystery of death, which are very much related to each other. and the mystery of time. the mystery of things that are larger than us. i think all that is pretty self-evident.

and again another ilxor who thinks nothing exists outside their own head tbrrwu.

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

ever more bizarre tbh

― close encounters of the third knid (darraghmac), Monday, February 12, 2024 12:47 PM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

If your hand is on a hot stove, what do you do to solve the problem and what is your desired outcome?

and again another ilxor who thinks nothing exists outside their own head tbrrwu.

― ꙮ (map), Monday, February 12, 2024 12:54 PM (thirty-six seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

me? if so, not what I'm saying either

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

― o. nate

look great as Dopesmoker is i don't see a reason to get down on Chuck Schuldiner like that

idk. sleep _can_ be great. i had a pretty bad nightmare last night. or, like, sleep paralysis? you ever have that? sleep paralysis is _awful_.

so i guess what i'd say is that i _don't_ experience sleep as "total consciousness obliteration". it's transition into a different state of consciousness, and when i'm awake, i tend not to remember what happens in that sleep state. being awake, we have sort of the gift of forgetfulness, of mostly not knowing what happens in our dreams. our dreams certainly affect our waking life, though, just as our life affects what happens in our sleep. for me, sleep, dreams, are a place where my subconscious can express things i'm afraid to acknowledge consciously. it's sort of like the fiction i write, in that sense... the ability to not need something to be "real" opens up new realms of possibility. i think it's one of the reasons i do some of my best writing in bed in the middle of the night. it's not a _healthy_ practice but it's a lot easier for me. y'all have seen a few of my long 3am posts by now, probably.

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

― close encounters of the third knid (darraghmac)

it's just clinical depression, deems. it's also, like... as much as my life is amazing and as much as i love it, i've been through a lot of shit, and i regularly go through more, just trying to exist. it hurts but at some point i just get numb, i just get exhausted, i just want it to fucking be _over_ with. it's like sitting through one of those fucking three hour blockbusters, or, like, there's this episode of MST3K where they just start yelling at the screen "END! END ALREADY!", and that's kind of how i feel about my life.

i could do something about it, but i also really love being alive and really don't want to, i guess, die that way. it seems silly. life sometimes seems far too long, but other times it seems far too short.

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.

― Evan

see, i really relate to this, based on my experience. because i haven't died, but i _have_ had my dick cut off, voluntarily, which is relevant because what i was taught is that having your dick cut off is either the same as being actually killed or perhaps even worse than dying. those of you of a certain age - y'all remember the "faces of death" films? they'd put out these videos and you'd see people dying, because i guess it was rare back, footage of people dying on camera. but they'd also put in footage of genital reconstruction surgery. which, for the record, i tried to watch footage once and no, that's not something i want to see, any more than i want to see eye surgery. in the 90s there was a cable show that would show stuff like that and it just squicked me the fuck out.

it wasn't _quite_ like me being suicidal. when i'm suicidal, sometimes i feel like i _need_ to die, but that passes pretty quickly. it's a transient feeling, and it's an _urgent_ feeling. with GRS it was more like resignation. more like, well, shit, i guess i'm gonna need to do this. another difference is that i am gonna die, like, no question about that. so i can just put that off indefinitely. penectomy, otoh, generally isn't a natural process. so i did _need_ to take action. i needed to make a long-term, sustained commitment to having that done.

that resignation came from one particular experience, where i tried to imagine for the first time in my life, at age 44, what it would feel like to have a clit. guys, you ever think about that? you ever wonder what having a clit would _feel_ like? if i had to guess i'd say probably not. like i said, it didn't occur to me, for whatever reason, until i was 44. when i did, though, i experienced what i would call a kind of gnosis, something that was very similar to the gender euphoria i had when my egg cracked. it wasn't intellectual - it was too fast for that. it was like something was wired in my synapses, just a bolt out of the blue. and because i'd already been through that bargaining process with transition, i knew immediately that there was no point trying to explain it away. i knew right away that i would _have_ to get GRS. it wasn't something i was looking forward to or wanted. it was just something i knew i needed.

at the same time i can't say i _knew_ what it would be like. i've heard people talk about having, you know, phantom body parts, a phantom vagina or whatever, and even the experience i had... i can't compare it to the actual experience of having a clit. i don't remember what it _felt_ like at age 44. i suspect that it didn't feel like i felt now. so i'd say i didn't know the outcome of the thing i, i guess we can say i "desired" it, it's not how i'd frame it but it's not an invalid framing. but i still had that intense desire for it, even though i didn't know what i was desiring.

that not knowing was the reason i had such intense fear, particularly the closer i got to the event. just before my surgery all kinds of people would congratulate me and say "you must be looking forward to this" and no, i wasn't, i was dreading it. i was very aware that i might be making the second-worst mistake of my life. (don't cold-turkey benzos.) one of the reasons i will glibly encourage cis men to go on and get their dicks cut off, you don't know you won't like it until you try it, is because i know that it's _not_ a decision _anybody_ undertakes trivially. it's completely terrifying. i knew the _likelihood_ that i was making a mistake was incredibly low, but the severity of that mistake, the possibility that i would wake up and say "My God, what have I done?", it was very much at the forefront of my mind. it's a cognitive bias i, and a lot of humans, i've found, have - we overestimate the possibility of severe negative outcomes, and discount the benefits of positive outcomes.

so in fact what happened was that i woke up and immediately thought to myself "oh, _this_ is what it was supposed to feel like all along." but, here's the thing, i _can't_ communicate this intelligibly to people who haven't experienced it. so even though i'm not dead, this particular country, if not undiscovered is... i'd say it's largely unmapped and sparsely populated. i can send letters.

death, in my head, it's having something, which is to say "life", and losing it, and i feel that having my dick cut off _was_ a loss, in a sense. it wasn't a significant physical loss - erectile tissue is pretty cool in a physiological sense but it wasn't something i had any particular use for. it also wasn't a loss of some abstract idea like "manhood". i've thought a lot about whether i ever was a man, as i understand the term, and i don't think i was. i don't think i was always a woman, but i don't think i was ever really a man. even if i had ever been one, GRS made no change in terms of my gender status. i'm surprised that some cis people still have this misconception - the idea that by having GRS i was "becoming a woman" or a "real woman" or whatever. i never thought of it that way and most trans people i know don't think of it that way either.

no, what i lost was genital dysphoria, and it was interesting because the older i get, the more i look at that famous donald rumsfeld saying and thinking wait, i understand this, i know where this is coming from. i was unaware that i even _had_ genital dysphoria until suddenly i didn't have it anymore. i didn't know what it would feel like to not have a penis, didn't know that its presence was causing any sort of negative feelings in me at all. this is the other thing i say when i tell cis men they should get their dicks cut off like i did. because one really _doesn't_ know necessarily if one has genital dysphoria. one _doesn't_ know the possible positive outcome. and of course nobody's going to do it because they think of it as being like death, as being this horrible loss, and for me it's the opposite, it's an amazing loss, a beautiful loss.

--

the other thing you talk about, evan, is the idea of _existing_ in the first place. this is such a hard thing for me to explain to cis people, the idea that i, prior to transition, _didn't exist_. most people know only one or the other. they either know what it's like to exist, or they know what it's like to not exist. and again, the rumsfeld thing, i knew what it felt like to not exist prior to transition, but i didn't know that i didn't exist. i didn't know that cisgender people had a fundamentally different experience of being than i did. i think that experience is a valuable experience, one i'm talking about here because of its religious implications, because of how it shapes how i feel about religion. it's at the center of why i sometimes say that queerness _is_ my religion. the feeling of going from nonexistence to existence is one of just profound, unparalleled joy, a joy that stays with me constantly. existing for me probably _isn't_ fundamentally different from existence for cis people, but i find that when i've had something for my whole life, it's easy to take it for granted. existence wasn't something that was just _handed_ to me on a silver platter. i needed help from lots of other people, and also i had to _work_ for it, i had to _earn_ it. which nobody should have to. it's a grossly unfair, grossly _inhumane_ expectation. what it does mean, though, is that i have a profound and lasting sense of both gratitude and joy. i don't take my existence for granted.

having said all that i will say that yeah, "nonexistence -> existence" is a bit of an oversimplification. it wasn't that i in my entirety didn't exist. gender means a lot of different things to a lot of different people and everyone experiences it in their own way. speaking only for myself, i find that my gender is central to my being, to my existence, to the extent that i can say that the person i was before is in some sense not-me, a stranger with my face, a stranger whose memories i have. ultimately there is a ship of theseus-style sense of continuity of self. earlier on in my transition i did see the person i was before as me, saw myself in the process of becoming. and i still am, we all still are, constantly. in a lot of ways i don't think of the change as a major one. that's weird to say. i was one person, and now i am another person, and i don't think of that as a major change. i think that i've gone through changes within myself, for instance, faith to unbelief, or married to divorced, that were bigger changes than going from deadname to kate was.

if i had to say i guess the difference is that i feel that kate was always within me, just in this inchoate, nameless form. it was very much something like sleep paralysis. i knew that i existed, but everything around me, including this construct that used the name i was born with, that took the best parts of me to make itself look more convincing, said that i wasn't real, that i didn't exist, that my pain wasn't real pain. that i didn't matter. and that construct, who i accept now _was_ sincerely acting in my best interest as they understood it, _was_ genuinely acting as a guardian, wound up, in a sense, killing himself.

there's this song by a band called We Are The Union called "December"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPgFoOCvT0g

the chorus goes:
You'll be dead in December
There can't be two of us forever

this creature that told me what everybody else told it, that i wasn't real, it turned out to not be real itself. and again, looked at from a religious sense it's very possible to draw parallels to gnostic thought, and i just don't look at it that way. Before-me wasn't created by some malevolent demiurge to deceive my true self. _I_ constructed before-me. I made that thing because that's what I needed to do to survive. It hurt like hell and I'm still dealing with the consequences of having done that, but it wasn't _evil_ of me to have done that. I did what I needed to do and I live with the consequences. That's all.

i don't know if all that speaks directly to the question of consciousness, but that is my experience with it, with being and unbeing, with existence and pre-existence and letting die the things stuck to me that needed to die.

religion and the origins of it are as much about explaining the mystery of life as the mystery of death, which are very much related to each other. and the mystery of time. the mystery of things that are larger than us. i think all that is pretty self-evident.

it would seem that way to me, too, but a lot of origin stories i take for granted ends up being less grandiose or intentional (if wahlburgers has an origin story, it's probably bogus), so it's worth playing around with the myth of where myths come from.

and again another ilxor who thinks nothing exists outside their own head tbrrwu.

we're all pretty much trapped in our own heads! except for sleep where we are vikings, etc...