ILX Religiosity and Spirituality and Agnosticity and Atheicity Poll

I want an afterlife where I can drink Negronis.

Curious if afterlife Negronis have made the transition to modern non-insect-based Campari, or if they're still old-school (can you kill bugs in the afterlife)?

We had a close encounter with death here in the household a few days ago when we euthanized our beloved 16-year-old cat. He'd had kidney disease for a while and been in serious decline for several months. It was time. We had an incredibly kind traveling vet who does this as her business come to our house and administer the shots here so he could die comfortably at home, with us holding him. I've had pets die before, but it's been a while and the experience, while of course deeply sad, was also fascinating. Watching his body, which had reached the point of visibly struggling with every breath, suddenly go still was touching in a way — like we could feel him relax for the first time in months. And the essence that was HIM, the traits and accumulated experiences that made up who he was, which had still been present albeit in greatly diminished form just a few moments earlier, was just ... completely gone.

Except not, because of course for us he will never be gone. We will carry him with us. Just as we carry all of those we knew who are no longer here, as someone said upthread. The only afterlife that I think we can count on is the one that happens here, among the people who know us or the things we did and left behind. And those things can be good or bad, god knows. Anyway, R.I.P. Barton, may you run in fields of baby bunnies and slow fat birds.

Sorry to hear Tipsy, I'm sure Barton is napping on a cloud, probably found a job as a lapcat in the waiting room to the pearly gates. I have it on good authority St. Peter was looking for a replacement

Obviously the lamp story could have been fake, but I can't find said confession anywhere and can't recall reading it on the original thread. I did discover it inspired a TikTok trend last year though

I love the idea of dreams having their own separate continuity, like a different life that runs parallel to our waking one. I've occasionally had dreams refer to events of previous dreams, but that's about it.

Is "atheicity" a word?

it is if you understand what it means, but especially if you didn't need to be told what it means

my favorite Police song

I prefer Atheicity II

I wonder what makes people believers/non-belivers. When I was 11 my favorite person, my autistic non-verbal cousin Andy ran away from home, was hit by a train, and died. I'm pretty sure that's the moment I stopped believing in God but I'm sure the same experience could have had the opposite effect on another person. I wonder what about me made me lose faith after that but what in another person might make them do the opposite. I think about this a lot.

I think about that too. I know a guy whose catalyst towards believing was his son (TW) comitting suicide..... Which when stated so plainly makes absolutely no sense, its basically an offensive proposition. But when you talk to him... I don't know it's just beyond a value judgement, it's beyond argument. I don't think he leaned into the faith as an anaesthetic, but Lord knows its been that for him and from a standpoint of pure pragmatism, I'm glad he has been able to find solace from something in that place

Sorry ENBB, I just realised me posting that after you shared your story is slightly insensitive. Truly sorry for your loss, that's a terrible thing that no 11yo should have to bear

Sympathies to you tipsy, ENBB, and H.P.

The world sometimes just wants to give us more things than we can handle.

Watching my mother nearly die for a year and then my father simultaneously get a degenerative nerve disease between 10 and 11 sure did a number on my belief in a higher power. Then the reverend at the church quit because he was having an affair with a member of the vestry. That solidified it.

I find faith beautiful in many ways, destructive in many ways. It isn’t for me— except the music.

Which is perhaps the most convincing argument for believing in a higher power, if I am being honest

If you're a music lover and don't believe in the divine/only conceptualise the divine in positivist terms, you're short-changing yourself imo

I'm being 50% serious and 50% facetious with that statement

I say that all to agree with you table. If there's any apologetic for the divine, it's whatever good art does to a person. By no means a good enough reason to believe, but enough to make you think "damn I'm so small and there is incomprehensible beauty/forces in this world" which is as much an experience of the numinous as any devotees religious fervour

Music fits into my belief that we’re just energy reacting to other energy. It’s beautiful y’all

One of my deepest lsd experiences was sitting by myself in the dark woods and seeing this kind of web of energy. The other deep religious experience was staring at the moon on a bottle robitusin and realizing how insignificant we are.

I don't think he leaned into the faith as an anaesthetic

Why?

One of my deepest lsd experiences was sitting by myself in the dark woods and seeing this kind of web of energy.

LSD otm, the web of energy is real. (Or as real as anything.)

https://www.energy.gov/science/articles/modeling-cosmic-web

I’ve visited the same dingy multifloor record store almost every night in my dreams for several years. The stock is dwindling and it’s gradually been getting shabbier.

xpost to HP:

totally. What is interesting to me is that I categorize certain music in my head as religious, but it isn’t at all— it is simply that I associate the divine with it.

I don't know about the divine exactly, but definitely believe in the transcendental power of art — in the sense that it can take us out of ourselves, it offers kinds of connections that I don't think we make any other way.

I was just overcome with the beauty of a song the other day and started tearing up. It made me think about this thread. I realized, however, that I was getting choked up because even though man is mortal, being able to create a song so beautiful is a form of immortality. I don't think it has to signify something actually divine.

music is ultimately communication, right? a way of us molding the energy to tell each other our feelings. tune one string to another. what is that if not honing the energy in some way.

FUCKING MAGNETS

sorry had a few

xp Tables: yeah look, I should clarify not all music is lifting me up to the third heaven. WAP for instance, hasn't taken me there (yet).

Well put Tipsy

I think art can do more than communicating our feelings, it can communicate things outside of ourselves too. I love "not" by Big Thief because it does apophatic theology so well. The song (and a million others) communicates more than a feeling imo

more than a feeeeeeeliiiiiiinggggg

I guess my main feeling about religion is that there’s so much fascinating stuff in science, neurology and psychiatry, etc that I have other stuff to explore than gods and such

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6l8MFdTaPE

i was just remembering the night i saw the web of energy, i watched my friend snap a small tree in half with his bare hands because his body went into fight mode after being trapped in a car listening to ween's "blackjack." that batch of acid was something else

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

I give Mr Stevens his due.

Where we are now
Soon it will be there

The arts have both feelings and ideas in them, that is one part of their appeal.

But for me, the main bits are collaboration and connection. In music, one often collaborates with other musicians and connects with an audience. This is the closest thing I have to a church right now.

There are musicians I have played with maybe once or twice, and I strongly feel that I know them. Perhaps as well as I know a cousin or stepsibling or schoolmate.

That's the biggest thing I miss about playing music with people, which I haven't done regularly in 20 years. I've been in bands with people I otherwise never hung out with, we weren't necessarily socially compatible or interested in the same things, except that we could play music together. It is a specific kind of connection for sure, maybe akin to what people who do theater feel about other performers, I don't know. Conjuring something together that only exists for as long as you're playing, it is a kind of magic.

Tipsy otm.

Any collaborative work forges connection - but collaborative artwork is especially magical.

Theater and music and parenting are important to me. (I have never made a movie or a TV show or a church or a business). I do think that people working together to _do a thing_ is the closest I have come to religion-esque ecstasy.

making music alone also makes me feel closer and connected to the universe and history and stuff. I imagine painters get a similar thing?

Perhaps. I like collaborative work most, but solo stuff like painting/drawing can also feel religious.

I just ran across a quote from Bertrand Russell that I think encapsulates the kind of thinking that typifies a large segment of those who identify as atheists.

"I think all the great religions of the world - Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, and Communism - both untrue and harmful. It is evident as a matter of logic that, since they disagree, not more than one of them can be true."

So many things in there to call out and examine in greater detail. The very least of which would be the exclusion of Judaism as one of the great 'religions' he cites (I used scare quotes because he tosses in Communism under the rubric of 'religion'). I'd rate the most tenuous item in that quote as the idea that religion requires, or aspires to, mathematically precise and logically demonstrable truth.

Isn't it a bit like saying since particle theory and wave theory disagree then only one of them can be true.

yeah any "skeptic" who looks at christianity and communism and goes like "yeah basically the same thing" has, uh, an interesting set of boundaries around the process of critical inquiry

focusing on which religion of them all is true after noting that none of them is is such lazy baiting

Russell was a pretty committed anti-communist if that means anything

you could also argue their common traits are proof there is no divine being. the concentration of power, misogyny, subjugation of others, abuse, corruption etc. if there is a god, why would the same manmade hierarchies recur so often?

if there is a god, why would the same manmade hierarchies recur so often?

because the nature of god cannot be deduced from an enumeration of human behaviors?

Russell was a pretty committed anti-communist if that means anything

― Andy the Grasshopper

i'm a committed anti-fascist, that doesn't make fascism a "religion", it's just fucking stupid

"i don't like it so therefore it's a religion" yeah seriously that's basically half of "new atheism" right there