ILX Religiosity and Spirituality and Agnosticity and Atheicity Poll

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...

Indeed I excel at sleep! Assuming of course there's no other way to interpret what you mean by that

Anyway yes we are trapped in our own heads, so from our own point of view all existence is obliterated when we are.

Of course we all understand that things outside our heads do carry on existing despite that.

Still not sure if that was directed at me though.

A bit simple to reduce religion "our answer to questions of the afterlife" imo. I'm partial to Rudolf Otto on this: inasmuch as religion is reducible (which I think is a bit of a non-starter for analysing religion imo), it's reducible to the "other". A voice which isn't a voice, a thing which isn't a thing, and experience that isn't an experience which reaches into our world and grips people to acknowledgement of its existence (which isn't an "existence"!). Some are gripped by this other, a religious intuition that what is here is not all that is here but rather a shadow of what is truly real. This is what all religions point to, a reality more real than reality. Plato's cave analogy gets at the concept but no analogy ultimately works as no real world images can properly illustrate something that is not of this world. So yeah, religion is a sign which says "hey, pay attention to this thing that you can't pay attention to but reveals itself and which we acknowledge through rite, service and devotion".

So yeah. Religion, if it is true, is a sign. Something that points to an "other", without ever being able to contain it. In that sense it is weak and almost completely devoid of meaning, except for its meaning as a sign. And because the subject of religion isn't contained by religion, then as Karl Barth says "God may speak to us through Russian Communism, a flute concerto, a blossoming shrub, or a dead dog. We do well to listen to Him if He really does."

Evan I thought map might be referring to himself? dunno though.

In the afterlife, you will be headed for the serious strife

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS2IBMQIjDo

My impression is that many ancient religions had little if anything to say about the afterlife. They were more about appeasing the gods for benefits in this life. I think the emphasis on the afterlife was kind of an innovation of Christianity.

Because life mostly sucks

been thinking a lot about this recently unfortunately because my son was, as i'm calling it, "touched by death" for the first time recently. he's 7 and another kids in his first grade class said he was going to bring a gun to school and shoot him. everything is fine (HAHAGAG!!) but he's been really obsessed with death. it's like a whole new dark hole opened up for him to venture down. when we lay in bed at night he gets upset, not about him dying, but about me or his mom. my wife and i are atheist but both grew up religious and my son went to a catholic daycare, so his first questions were about heaven and if we will be together again. so while i agree that "answers about the afterlife" is not the sole purpose of religion, it's definitely a strong element.

i personally think this all happens in our brain somewhere. didn't they locate some unique part of the brain that lights up when someone's having a "religious" experience? i've also been reading about how in the final moments before your brain shuts down, there's an abnormal amount of brain activity that has been observed. they think this is where most near death experiences come from. i love the idea of my brain going into a sort of learned shutdown mode where it comforts you as you go

To clarify my point, in my opinion, the origin of supernatural belief comes primarily from attempts to explain the unknowable, and death is significant because it is more than any other thought experiment completely inconceivable to actually imagine not existing from a first person perspective.

"What is death like?" interpreted as "what is that experience like?" makes no sense to answer if you in fact no longer exist. The cliche and accurate "it's like before you were born" is also something you didn't experience either so it doesn't really address the question, at least not in the way that the people asking the question are craving. Therefore most answers all default to having existing as a prerequisite, even the "it's just total blackness/silence", because you have to exist to perceive those sensations.

Since it is so difficult to NOT imagine a scenario where we continue to exist in some way or another, all of the "where do we go" "why do we go there" "what force manages this other plane of existence" "is the force intelligent like us" "what are the circumstances that dictate that existence" very quickly follow, answers are hypothesized and then the lore is extended to tie into explanations of the rest of our living existence, and this is how I believe all religions were and are formed.

In short, I never meant to say it was the "sole purpose" of religion, just a main part of the way in which religious belief is conjured.

xp my son got the same way for a while - he kept asking what happens after you die, and thought it unfathomable that I somehow did not know. I guessed that maybe you come back as someone else. He said if he comes back he hopes he gets the same mom and dad, so that's nice.

i personally think this all happens in our brain somewhere. didn't they locate some unique part of the brain that lights up when someone's having a "religious" experience? i've also been reading about how in the final moments before your brain shuts down, there's an abnormal amount of brain activity that has been observed. they think this is where most near death experiences come from. i love the idea of my brain going into a sort of learned shutdown mode where it comforts you as you go

I've read about this a lot too. I know a lot of skeptics point to this as evidence of NDEs not signifying anything but I'm not convinced yet. first of all, aren't there plenty of accounts of NDEs where the person saw or heard something that they shouldn't have while unconscious? secondly, how would such a mechanism even evolve in the first place? what evolutionary purpose does that serve?

evan

what if ppl thought it was really easy to imagine not existing

im not sure you should be making absolute claims from one perspective

i must say tbh i dont see any hardship in imagining it at all

It's interesting you're skepticism is directed at the implied "mechanism" that threatens the theory of an afterlife from a practicality standpoint rather than instead skeptical of notion of the afterlife itself which raises millions of practicality questions (about how or why we would be granted this magical gift of preservation divorced from our physical selves). I don't mean that as an attack, just an observation.

xp

evan

what if ppl thought it was really easy to imagine not existing

im not sure you should be making absolute claims from one perspective

i must say tbh i dont see any hardship in imagining it at all

― close encounters of the third knid (darraghmac), Wednesday, February 14, 2024 12:34 PM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

I think we have to make sure we're talking about "imagining it" in the same way. First of all, I'm intellectually aware of existence before and after I have the ability to observe it. It's an abstract thought; not what I'm talking about. Also I can imagine a world that exists without me, but in doing that I'm still visualizing it; I'm observing it or perceiving it in some way.

What do you mean when you say you can imagine it?

I think the emphasis on the afterlife was kind of an innovation of Christianity.

It's impossible to determine the beliefs of groups and individuals from the deep past, but it is true that archaeologists have unearthed a lot of very ancient burials over the past 150 years and there's often plenty of surviving evidence of ritual practices connected to death. It does bother me how confidently these traces of forgotten rituals get described as evidence of a belief in an afterlife. I always feel like pushing back against that confidence which feels like it oversteps the confines of science and enters into pseudoscience.

As a baseline the "afterlife" as I'm referring to it means simply anything that counts as: consciousness-somehow-NOT-obliterated-upon-death

Not sure if that clears anything up, or if it even needed to be.

xp i mean everything stops

im not talking about the world's existence which i think you keep referencing in oblique ways

i mean when i die everything stops

the idea that i must have a more detailed description of that simple fact to match any other worldview of afterlife, i reject tbh

the idea that i have to have an idea of what "everything stops" "feels like" in order to believe it, i reject

its ok that you've thought a lot about how "everything stops" isnt as good as heaven or w/e, i dont mind. nobody has ever experienced either and there's no valid description of either but there they both are.

the idea that after "everything stops" someone gas to tell you what that feels like in order to prove they understand it enough to believe it, i mean

which tbh i am picking up from you repeatedly, rightly or wrongly

Relaxed atheist with a fascination for those who are capable of belief (the consciousness, the discipline, the humility) and a mild case of the ocean, man.

I was told stories as a kid that somehow amounted to religion and belief. Then a period of doubt and anger. I wanted to argue and explain the phenomenon away. Then a gradual rediscovery and acceptance of what it means to people to be spiritual, the profound if ambivalent role of the Church in history, and a vague wish to feel and assert something too.

I'm married to a believer (Christian, Pentecostal, very private about it). I feel closest to the mystics, not in the sense that I believe myself, but that it makes me emotional to witness the intensity and the intimacy of it. The best I can do is try to imagine where belief would fit if I hadn't built myself around other things. And now for the ocean. Since I can't see the creator, at least I can see the creation: nature is a temple, I love people, life amazes me, and I believe that this love needs to be cared and cultivated, and those may well look like religious values, or a preoccupation with the soul, even if it does not quite circle back to actual spirituality. Maybe that's Pascalian, I don't know, but there are a lot of things that seemed stupid that now seem like interesting experiments. And what are we here for, if not to try to know everything that can be known, entertain ideas that can be conceived, and embrace what can be.

Pretty sure the pagan ancestors of both myself and deems believed in an afterlife and they were burying them with their finest possessions to carry there at Newgrange and elsewhere three millennia before Christ existed.

In any case, this seems a little esoteric of a focus to me. I get that many people are very interested in the sense of the grandiose but to me it doesn’t feel like that. I’m pretty sure I didn’t believe in God a good portion of my life either.

i swear im not here to pick bones out of any description, i am enjoying them all and theres more to recognise than not in most peoples viewpoints as set out even where im immediately zooming in

but....(i am what i am lads, thomas and the prodigal sons younger brother shouldve told them to go fuck themselves)

nabozo, is belief a choice? i keep returning to how much that is a fundamental contradiction to me

and even if it is a choice (nb i like and i think have always agreed with the distinction between faith/belief which i think was aimless's above) then i still fail to see why it carries with it the positive aspects suggested in your opening lines.

its hard not to imagine that a lack of belief.... doesn't?

but any one belief can be a closed and hard and arrogant belief, just as any one lack of belief can have the same.

im interested!

i mean when i die everything stops

this is a very common belief. there's even a name for it. solipsism. it's a near cousin to the idea that when I leave my house it ceases to exist until I return.

ive worded that badly

the personal experience is that everything stops

everyone else carries on

ie the very opposite of solipsism

I don't believe in God because I don't believe in God. it's not something I spend much time wondering about tbh.