I used to assume the religious people were missing something and missing out on the latest and greatest.
Now I am seeing that often it's us the non-religious that have lost something of value and are trying to replace it with things that don't work as well.
I was raised in a Christian community and went to a private Christian school all the way until graduation, though really stopped believing all the stuff by 11th grade or so. And it's wild the parallels I see between the modern political climate and religion. It really seems that in the process of masses leaving the church, they've gone on to adopt the exact same behaviors but worshipping other things - government, advertising, virtue signalling to show you're the most "on board" with the movement. They've wrapped around to enforcing censorship of art and being against free speech just like the Christians did when they were in charge.
But I recall most people in the actual church at least had some form of a community, and many seemed happy and selfless. This modern church that pretends it isn't a church only breeds toxicity, selfishness, vitriol, and depression. Everyone is holding each other hostage, knowing that if anyone steps out of line and questions the status quo they'll be burned in the village square as an example to whoever might do it next. The actual church community I was in was more accepting in almost all regards than this new system.
I honestly wish a lot of these people would just find a normal religion. It's way easier to get along with normal religious people than the types people being getting hooked on these new systems of thought.
> It really seems that in the process of masses leaving the church, they've gone on to adopt the exact same behaviors but worshipping other things - government, advertising, virtue signalling to show you're the most "on board" with the movement.
I think that's because these things aren't from church, they're part of human nature.
One of the churches I went to as a child was toxic, the other wasn't. The religious community isn't immune to human nature.
50-60 years ago the country was much more religious and you’d encounter people saying they’d never let their child marry a democrat and vice-versa according to my grandparents. To them, things are mostly better and what we have is the appearance of greater division.
I think the 1910 figure might have more to do with practical concerns. When you have no car and live on a farm far from anything, as a huge number of people did back then, you can't regularly get to church even if you wanted to. So I wouldn't interpret that number as a clean measure of religiosity.
Go for a drive in new england sometime and count the churches in the sticks. There's usually 2-5 congregations per tiny little hamlet, most of them built in the mid-1800s or earlier; most of them now defunct or dying. Sometimes you get 3 schisms of congregationalists in a row!
"build a church and school within reasonable walking distance" was rule 1 of new towns for a good long while.
Could some of that be due to the shift from a rural to urban society? If getting to church requires taking a horse and buggy 10 miles down dirt roads, then most weeks you might have a DIY religious observance at home on the farm instead. If you live in a town where you can walk to a neighborhood church, you're probably more likely to make it a regular habit.
It's kind of the other way around: what was so weird and new about the 50s that performative church attendance was so high?
And i can think of ~three answers: post-war trauma, a population bubble, and a percieved need in the white middle class for social discrimination and "order" against internally, integration and externally, "the godless commies". (see: HUAC, adding "under god" to the pledge)
I figure that the 50s were an anomaly, not the other way around.
> 50-60 years ago the country was much more religious
I think religion adapts and changes; religion was more mainstream, less toxic, and uniform than it is now. The median person is probably less religious (in terms of sticking to an established religion) but the upper 1/3 of the spectrum is more religious, in that they believe more extreme things, with less evidence, and are less likely to compromise. The past 40 years of the evangelical movement, which has been coopted by the conservative movement, has been extremely polarizing.
I'm not sure that it was any less toxic, just that the background level of toxicity has decreased.
My mother clearly remembers being called out in front of her church for the unforgivable sin of attending a school dance, and that was in the mid-60s. Don't forget why the Southern Baptists broke away from the Baptists.
just grinning a little at the phrase "breaking away from the baptists" : really, what's to break away from? It's a denomination primarily defined by everyone being a schismatic from everyone else.
A certain amount of this conformism is human nature .. but a lot of people, especially anyone queer, was rejected by the church rather than left. I suspect you're not seeing this because you're not in the reject category.
The failure mode of churches (and, yes, some of the more optimistic commune arrangements) is toxic positivity: everything is great, and anyone who doesn't agree is going to be dealt with. This makes it extremely difficult to report when someone has been raping adults or children.
I think the cat's out of the bag - there's no sky friend looking out for us. There's no going back now for most people.
This has been replaced by ersatz religions, but I think we should start explicitly worshipping the concept of civilization and progress. From a certain point of view, civilization is a cybernetic organism that encompasses all of us and gives us all sorts of neat things.
"Progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turn, then to go forward does not get you any nearer.
If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man."
That's much too simplistic and isn't going to convince anyone of the point you're trying to make.
> his has been replaced by ersatz religions, but I think we should start explicitly worshipping the concept of civilization and progress
We've done this multiple times before and always with disastrous or at least dissipative results. The technical term for this is "cult" and more specifically "idolatry". There are very good reasons why this has generally been proscribed by monotheistic religions.
> civilization is a cybernetic organism that encompasses all of us
Saying civilization is cybernetic in that it consists of feedback loops that keep it in a stable condition is stretching it. Perhaps a nation could be cybernetic since it contains a variety of channels through which this information can flow in both directions but a civilization as a supranational system has some very tight bottlenecks that would impede such functioning.
> gives us all sorts of neat things
It does not. People do that and the things are not so much given as they are bargained for whether with money or by signing on to a social contract or adopting cultural values.
> I think we should start explicitly worshipping the concept of civilization and progress
Isn't this exactly what the French Revolution's first wave, the Nazis, the Soviets, and the Maoists all did? Or are you suggesting something more explicitly Hegelian like the religion of "The sign of the T" from Brave New World (though that religion was focused on production not transformation)?
There's no doubt about that. Humans have a very strong religious bent that is bred into us by evolution selecting for motivated, tenacious people who fight to survive but whose brains can't stop patterning-matching, perceiving threats and agency behind things, and performing rituals. Not to mention, organizing around common beliefs. Without various sky-friend myths, we organize around other myths. Thankfully we have good science now, but that's unfortunately often less sexy (and more difficult) than pseudo-science and fads.
No only are people worshiping dishonest politicians, but since radical people don't abandon their ideas, the churches have gone through a selection process where all but the most radical of them weakened.
We have lost something very important on the conversion of our society to laic values. We have gained very important things too, so I don't think the best correction is to reverse anything, but we have some work to do on those things that we lost.
This has way more to do with the kind of person who leans areligious in a religious society than being areligious itself. In a religious society, most normal people will be religious
In more atheistic countries, the religious people are the ones that are harder to get along with, as normal people are a lot less religious.
Genuinely, you come across as someone who does not interact with non believers and have attitude about them shaped primary by hostile media. Starting from assumption that most people who left Christianity joined "movement" which seems to be mostly euphemism for culture war you are fully into.
> It really seems that in the process of masses leaving the church, they've gone on to adopt the exact same behaviors but worshipping other things - government, advertising, virtue signalling to show you're the most "on board" with the movement.
People serve these idols, and many others, to give meaning to their lives, to justify their existence. They are afraid of death--that is, not only physical death but everything which does or seems to militate against life: alienation, lack of identity, frustration, pain, meaninglessness. And so they grasp, as it were, after aspects of life which seem to promise freedom from some form of death, and serve them as idols. But what they are really serving is death, for the fear of death is the power behind all idolatry. And yet, as we have seen, idolatry can only lead to death in one form or another, to violence and dehumanization and also to the degradation or destruction of what is idolized.
It is a distinctive mark of the biblical mind to discern that human history is a drama of death and resurrection and not, as religionists of all sorts suppose, a simplistic conflict of evil vs. good in an abstract sense. For what is "good" is, basically, what is good for man and creation--in other words, what is life-giving, life-preserving, life-perfecting. God, the Living One, is the author of life, he is on the side of life...That which is truly evil is that which thwarts life. And sin is any denial or rejection of the gift of life; an offense against God who bestows the gift. But the wages of sin is death, not by some arbitrary decree on God's part, but because sin by its nature is possessed of death, anti-life, death-dealing, both to the sinner and in the various kinds of death it occasions in the world.
You're probably in the right head space to appreciate "Impostors of God: Inquiries Into Favorite Idols" by William Stringfellow (1969).
Cryptonomicon is another good one, though far less prophetic/scholarly:
To translate it into UNIX system administration terms (Randy's fundamental metaphor for just about everything), the post modern, politically correct atheists were like people who had suddenly found themselves in charge of a big and unfathomably complex computer system (viz, society) with no documentation or instructions of any kind, and so whose only way to keep the thing running was to invent and enforce certain rules with a kind of neo-Puritanical rigor, because they were at a loss to deal with any deviations from what they saw as the norm. Whereas people who were wired into a church were like UNIX system administrators who, while they might not understand everything, at least had some documentation, some FAQs and How tos and README files, providing some guidance on what to do when things got out of whack. They were, in other words, capable of displaying adaptability.
You might like Jordan Peterson's podcast. He talks often about the human need to believe in something outside of ourselves. This need can be satisfied by many things, not all of them good.
Dennis Prager is pretty good on this front too. But, he thinks that religion is a necessity for a happy life.
I don't follow any faith. There are too many religions for any one to be "correct". But I do see religion as a good moral guide, particularly in times of hardship.
Just because somebody believes in a religion doesn't mean they have nothing to teach you. As far as I can tell through the internet, both are good honest people.
I don't think that it is an overstatement to say that Peterson alone has helped millions improve their lives through his books, talks, and interviews.
Prager is no different from the Rush Limbaughs of the world. He’s another divisive conservative talking head fomenting the culture wars they need to stay relevant.
Whether or not the changes many have made in their lives as a result of Peterson’s work are improvements is also debatable.
I suppose the hundreds of people that have made a point to personally thank him for showing them a way to improve their lives are just lieing about his influence. /s
People give thanks to prosperity preachers for their spiritual guidance even as they sit hungry watching the preacher drive away in his Bentley purchased with the money they tithed.
Spot on! Science that can’t be questioned isn’t science it’s dogma. The whole Dr. Fauci worship culture and “trust the science” that emerged during the pandemic felt way too much like a religious cult.
There are a lot of things religion provides that modern society is really dismal at providing: community, care, socialization across class/career lines, relationships with people who live near you, a support system for sick/hurting people, and other benefits
The thing is, none of those are innately tied to religion. We've abandoned churches for what I feel are largely good reasons, but we haven't found something else to fill that void in community and care. We're more insular, more online, less of us know our neighbours or really have a stake in our community welfare in the same way. I don't think the solution is going back to religion.
I think you are right in that in theory you could have "all that stuff" sans religion. And in fact I think Atheism in the boomer generation benefited from cultural inertia - like, you could say you don't belong to a religion but still marry, have kids, participate in community etc simply because that's what everyone else (by the virtue of their religion) was doing around you.
But today it seems like critical mass is elsewhere, and it seems like the religious folks now have a huge advantage over everyone else in terms of marriage, family formation, community and maybe even mental health. So while in theory it's possible, it seems like in practice all of those things declined among the non-religious, just perhaps with a lag of a generation.
The reason I think it might make sense to reengage with religion is the crux of this question: does life have a point, a meaning, etc. Not even "what" the point is but does it exist at all. The idea that the universe is a total accident and nothing is relevant takes you in a certain direction in life and society, while the idea of "there's meaning and purpose" in another.
I think it's hard to anchor your life in the value of meaning without logically accepting a creator of that meaning.
So I think there's an element of faith - either you chose to believe there's meaning or you chose to believe there isn't, everything else is implied by that choice of belief.
I don't think they're missing out. I just think they're deluded.
It's not the worst thing in the world to be deluded - and frankly I just don't care what they do and say unless it starts to impact me and mine. It's not religion per se I dislike - people are free to live their lives as they see fit, it's the control-structure scam of an organized religion that reels in the gullible, the poor, the disadvantages, those who believe what they're being told. That is disgusting, IM(ns)HO.
These megapastors (and even not-so-megapastors) bilking their flock to pay for the latest Learjet... I think they believe in religion as much as I do, tbh.
You’re using the most extreme example to condemn essentially all organized religion. Many religious scholars and preachers live modest lives, sometimes even by choice.
Of course “religious” folks who tell people they should simply endure, rather than resist, injustice and inequality are disgusting. But sometimes despite your best efforts, the bad guys still win (temporarily).
Telling people that this life is not the end-all-be-all is only manipulative if it’s meant to make people passive. And I know that not everyone informs people about the afterlife out of malice.
I was born into a Muslim family and have remained a Muslim my entire life, but I have had ups and downs in how observant I have been. I’ve had periods where I was less enthusiastic than my parents. On the flip side, I’ve flirted with extremism a few times and even started alienating my immediate family members. Now, over 40 years old, I feel like I’ve found the right balance: a strong relationship with God, without being seen as obnoxious or dangerous. It feels amazing both personally and when subtly sharing what I believe is the most important factor in having a happy, fulfilling life.
Interestingly, Muslims believe most messengers began their missions at or around 40, so maybe everything before is “formative years”. The one known exception is Jesus Christ, whom we believe was raised to God at 33 but still has a huge role to play in shaping the world.
Not all non-religious people suffer from some kind of spiritual or ethical deficiency.
I get saddened when religious storytelling fills people with fairy tales and arbitrary hate and makes them incapable of seeing things about existence that are truly beautiful.
I'm not sure exactly how to explain this, but the seemingly infinite level of "detail" or "texture" or "complexity" to our universe. No matter how small or large you go, there's always some patterns, some structures, some details to be seen. There's always some other perspective or way of grouping and organizing to reveal new information. The complexity is infinitely deep, wide and layered. Some of that I think is inherent, and some of it is what we create as living entities - which is a great privilege we enjoy.
Take a white painted wall made of drywall. Relatively uninteresting most of the time. But the potential amount of information about it is almost infinite:
* What are all the layers of construction needed to make it?
* What did it cost? For every cent of that money, where did it eventually go? All of them can be tracked from its creation until the end of the currency.
* What people designed the methods to construct it? What were their lives like, what led to them doing so?
* What does the surface look like if you were to look at it at 10x, 100x, 10,000x, etc. scale? How does all of that structure change when it's under pressure? Or wet? Or on fire? Or crushed? Or at different temperatures?
* What does it look like as molecules of air bounce off of it and it insulates the room?
* What are its physical properties? What does it look like in all the different wavelengths of light?
* What is it history, from the retrieval of the materials to its final destruction some time in the future? What is its eventual fate? Will it be destroyed to make room for a newer building? Or in a war? A natural disaster?
* What people were near it? What were they doing and why? Office workers? Secretaries? Programmers? Nurses? Was it separating people who were friends or hated each other?
* What's the history of the design of the pigment used on the wall? What previous pigments did it replace and why?
* If you look at the pattern of bumps and valleys on the surface, does it match some existing pattern? What mathematical formula would most closely re-create the surface variations? What's the closest match to that pattern anywhere in the universe, at any scale? Maybe there's some sand on a beach or a cluster of stars that when viewed from just the right angle matches the pits and valleys on the wall.
* What does the surface feel like? Not just for one person, but for all humans? If you were to take every single human who has ever lived and let them feel the wall, what would happen? Which ones would tell jokes? Which ones would remember something from their past? Which would have some interesting specialist perspective on it? Which ones would like it? Hate it? How would they all describe it?
We only have access to a tiny fraction of that information. But it's all there! You could spend an eternity studying a single blade of grass and it's relation to everything else and all of the history. There's always some new abstraction or perspective or way to look at everything.
Most of us suffer a kind of nihilism that mankind has never really faced before due to modern science. Materialistic understanding of the world has broken our ability to recognize patterns of being that were once obvious to our ancestors. They would find a modern atheist and fundamentalist equally blind in these areas as they saw the reality of the world much more alive and predictable over vast time periods than we do now and they had the language to understand it.
John Vervaeke and the Pageau Brothers are working hard on this front. I'd highly recommend John's Meaning Crisis Videos, Mathieu Pageau's book on Cosmic Symbolism and Johnathan's educational videos.
If you are new to this, it can be a bit mind bending, but it's duly needed in our time.
I really wish I could be religious. I know that the community and meaning it provides would bring me a lot of happiness, I just can't look past it being untrue.
Unitarian Universalism is a church without dogma. Basically, people who generally believe there's a purpose to life, that nobody has any sort of monopoly on the truth, and that there's value to congregating.
"There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness." - DFW
Academic science resembles religion with its dogmas, nepotism, bureaucracies, and favor-currying shibboleths. Deep learning in particular is akin to modern alchemy [1].
This is a great point and as someone who has grown from a total atheist to the person that kicked off this thread, I can relate.
I don't think there's a simple answer on how to flip that light switch but I can share some ideas.
First, do you have religious people in your life whom you respect even if you don't share their faith. Ask them about it - you can literally say "I don't get it at all but I am curious, what's this like for you?" And just see what resonates.
Second, that is a question you can direct to a member of clergy. If you can't envision yourself walking into a house of worship, shoot an email and be like "I am faithless but curious. I am sure I am not the first one..."
Third, be really for hits and misses. Not every religious person can articulate it in a way that will make sense to you, and not every clergy person can speak to it effectively either (some people can only preach to the converted, to borrow a phrase.) But if you ping a few people, some of them may give you something that's a good thread to follow.
Fourth, I suggest starting with whatever faith your family was historically in. There's something cool about that.
Fifth, if really nothing else - shoot me a way to contact you and we can chat about my experience.
Further. Religion requires something to assent and belong to. That will always be a choice to some degree.
As someone who is formerly deeply Christian and left for intellectual/theological reasons. I miss the communal binding of organized worship. But reversing or getting back to that place requires either 1) letting go of intellectual integrity, or 2) finding a group who is similarly interested in dispassionate community organizing without supernatural theology.
The 1st has proven personally impossible. The 2nd seems very unlikely. All the attempts of secular church I have seen never pick up steam and trail off over time. Thus, the person who sees religious association as a broad good is left without a natural landing spot.
// But reversing or getting back to that place requires either 1) letting go of intellectual integrity
I love how you crystalized the point although I've reached a different conclusion.
This was actually my original "before" state - I assumed that religion was an illogical holdover and not something that I ( a logical / scientist ) person can internalize.
But over time, I connected with people who are very smart and very logical and whose faith is deepened by this (though to be clear, faith is still faith - even if you believe in the absence of a deity that's still a belief)
So I am very happy that I am at a place where I can grow my religious and faithful over time while being logically and internally consistent.
I appreciate that this is something that matters to you and perhaps something you could enjoy is to connect with someone whom you respect as an intellectual who is also religious, and see how they make sense of it.
> I don't know a single person who is an intellectual, scientifically minded, and openly religious.
But you may well know people who are intellectual, scientifically minded and closeted religious. As this thread can attest, there is rampant discrimination against religious experience and thought in the science/tech community.
> So I'm asking genuinely here on HN how you do it.
I believe that most deep religious experiences are things that happen to you, not things that you actively plan for. But having said that, I believe that the key in general is humility. So many people in this thread (and others on HN) have displayed incredible arrogance that is an effective protective barrier from having a religious experience. This is very much their loss. We all end up humbled eventually though.
No matter how you feel about religion in the 21st century, we would not have a civilization were it not for religion. When you dig deep enough, you will generally find that the seed of the society came from a visionary mystic. Even Genghis Khan was a shaman as much as he was a warrior.
Empirical science is neither the beginning nor the end, though it is an extraordinarily powerful tool. The rules of empirical science are bounded in such a way that it is essentially impossible to talk scientifically about some of the most important aspects of being human. Funnily enough, scientists engage just as much as religious people in mysticism when they throw up their hands and describe consciousness as an "emergent" phenomenon.
Religious texts are deeply fascinating if you allow them to be. Think of them as founding civilizational documents like a constitution. All of us live in cultures that descend from these (relatively) ancient texts. You would not be here if it weren't for these past religious traditions. That doesn't mean that we should blindly follow religious leaders or accept everything that we read in these texts. But we should at least have some curiosity about how we got here and ask what relevant wisdom might still be there for us in these texts. That is a far more scientific approach than casually dismissing religion as nonsense.
There's an intellectual, scientifically minded, and openly religious person that writes this blog: http://www.wall.org/~aron/blog/
And partly through his influence, today I am Christian and openly religious enough to write this comment. As to whether I'm intellectual and scientifically minded... I'd say so, though it seems a little vain to admit to being intellectual. :-)
// But... HOW? ... I don't know a single person who is an intellectual, scientifically minded, and openly religious. So I'm asking genuinely here on HN how you do it.
I need to write in more depth about it. I'll give you a super short TLDR and I apologize if this is not sufficient to intellectually connect to.
Let me hit it from two angles:
First of all, you do know many such people. For example, Isaac Newton was deeply religious, as was Darwin (his faith was later shaken by the loss of a child), Georges Lemaître who theorized the Big Bang was a Catholic Priest, Edward Hubble who observed evidence of the Big Bang, was a devout Christian. People claim that not much is known about Einstein's religiosity, but it's interesting that he supported a fundraising effort to translate the Talmud into English for example.
So one angle is - you know the founding figures today's science and many/most of them saw no conflict between their science and religion. A quick response may be "well that's what people just believed back then" but - what is the understanding that we have that these scientists didn't, which gives us firm foundation to dismiss religion whey they themselves embraced it?
Second, let's go on a quick mental experiment. Let's accept for the moment that the universe is an accident, that all life is random and that the only reason humans are as we are, is because we evolved to outsmart our predators and prey. A logical implication of that is that we would have no reason to develop the intellect and senses that enable us to understand true reality - to grasp how the universe works. We evolved to just be smart enough to eat a cow rather than be eaten by a wolf.
If you accept that perception/intellectual limitation, the implication is that humans can't expect to assert anything about reality. Just because our instruments don't detect something or our eyes can't see something speaks nothing of the existence of that thing either way. Same as just because some creature didn't evolve sight, doesn't mean that the thing it could have seen if it had sight, doesn't exist - but that creature has no idea!
That takes us to a logical place: humans aren't equipped to objectively conclude anything about the universe. So if you assert lack of creation, lack of divinity - that's just what you chose to believe despite the fact that your tooling for perceiving these things is lacking. So it's faith either way.
I don't think I articulate the 2nd point well enough, it needs more. But let me know how it sounds, I'd appreciate the feedback.
It sounds similar to the hypothetical what-happens-the-day-after-capitalism; those who want - or at least don't not want - struggle to think of the pragmatics of what it looks like.
I wouldn't say I'm a born-again-whatever - I usually describe myself as an optimistic spiritual agnostic - but I think a combination of broadening my horizons physically (geographically moving around) and mentally (actually paying attention in grad school to the liberal arts that I thumbed my nose at as an undergrad) and getting hit repeatedly with how little I/we actually know about anything has let me inch away from the cynical a(nti)religiosity and submit to something larger than me.
This has also given me a better appreciation of the books I (was supposed to have) read in high school; in hindsight, I don't think there's any way many students could draw much meaning from them without having their own life experiences.
I prefer the Buddhist interpretation of the afterlife to the Catholic one. Hell is temporary vs eternal, and contingent on not being a monstrous asshole, not your relationship with god.
Speaking as a Catholic, the eternity of hell is based on your willingness to be a monster rather than serve the one who is the source of all good. Which is as horrible an opinion as one could have.
"Suddenly" can only happen with grace. One day at a time, one moment at a time, searching for Him until He calls "Zacchaeus come down" (Luke 19:1-10) is the only way we can dispose ourselves for that moment.
As a religious person who has deeply considered leaving it, I've never understood the arrogance of some atheists. For me it was disturbing to try to internalize the ideas that the universe is uncaring, that good and evil are made up, that your consciousness is basically like the contents of a stick of RAM that will vanish when it loses its power source.
Even the original "God is dead" quotes from Nietzsche sound mournful, not arrogant. From what I understand he was trying to convey the same thing you are: that by turning away from religion, we are undoing many of the basic moral underpinnings of our culture. Now we have to rebuild them with something new, and quite obviously, people can't agree on one set of ideas.
> For me it was disturbing to try to internalize the ideas that the universe is uncaring, that good and evil are made up, that your consciousness is basically like the contents of a stick of RAM that will vanish when it loses its power source.
I find that disturbing, too, even as someone who believes it's likely true.
But when I was deeply Christian, I also found my denomination's view on the afterlife disturbing, too. If you live literally forever, what happens when you've done everything that matters? What even matters anymore in a world without need? How can everyone be happy at the same time if happiness depends on other people whose wants may not align? If existence in the afterlife is fundamentally different from the mortal life, there's still something of familiarity to me that will end forever. Maybe that's equivalent to my current conscious experience blinking out.
I've come to view life as a ride. It's valuable for its own sake, not because of some greater meaning I can't ascertain. It's an absolute miracle that we all exist, in the thousands of years of culture and writing, we're nowhere close to knowing why we're here, so why bother wasting my one life worrying about it when the joys of existing are self-evident.
Just like some atheists need to the corresponding lesson about theists, it's worth taking a step back and remind yourself that not everybody was raised in a religious way.
Don't forget that to some of us religious stories contain nothing of particular interest or are similar to ancient fairy tales, and the history of various churches and religions is a mere part of the general human history of power struggles between elites in various countries. When you haven't been raised in religious ways, you feel no guilt about making blasphemous remarks and do not fear the wrath of supposed supernatural entities.
> For me it was disturbing to try to internalize the ideas that the universe is uncaring, that good and evil are made up, that your consciousness is basically like the contents of a stick of RAM that will vanish when it loses its power source.
Everyone of us wants to feel significant, loved, and giving up on an idea that we live forever, that there's always someone external looking out for us etc is an emotionally difficult process to go through.
But that's what personal growth is. It doesn't mean that you go nuts and do crazy shit - consequences exist. What it means is that your perspective changes and you become OK with just being you, and taking a journey on a speeding rock through space.
People think that you lose when you give up religion, which is in part true - but there is also a lot to be gained - in personal development, seeing life from a different perspective and appreciating the limited time we have before donating our atoms back to the universe.
> but there is also a lot to be gained - in personal development
So replace religion with unscientifically naive optimism? That too is a delusional narrative. "Donating your atoms back to the universe" as if a personified "universe" cares about you on its way to heat death, someone get me my spirit crystals.
You might say you're off the religious dance-floor, but you're still doing the moves. In fact it's almost more rational to get back into one of the holy books, at least there you can connect the dots on attaching meaning to the present.
Sounds like someone got triggered by the phrase "personal development"...
Not sure what's so delusional about having your atoms be reused for other purposes when you die... what else would happen?
As for the word "donating", that's more a personal mindset. What I'm saying is, I'm OK with death, I'm not so egotistical to think that I'm anything more than a moment in time.
Optimism and naivety, well you can interpret whatever I said however you like, but there's actually no real argument that you've made in relation to what I wrote.
> For me it was disturbing to try to internalize the ideas that the universe is uncaring, that good and evil are made up, that your consciousness is basically like the contents of a stick of RAM that will vanish when it loses its power source.
How is that arrogant? It seems humble to me to acknowledge that I as an individual and a society on the whole don't actually mean much.
Community is the main thing religious provides. But in exchange, you typically have to believe in some type of sky magician. It's too bad because I enjoyed the community aspect of religion growing up but never really was able to buy into the sky magician part.
You've discovered a (large) group of people who have torn down Chesterton's Fence without fully appreciating why it was there to begin with. Same with people who "smash the (patriarchy|capitalism)", they end up extremely discontent to realize that other things end up filling the vacuum and they're often worse, much worse.
Same. I met so many religious people who were smarter, more widely read, and wiser than me that my childhood prejudices about them had to be drastically re-evaluated, even though my fundamental position on the existence of God is unchanged. Faith is now on an entirely separate axis from intelligence or wisdom for me.
That's interesting to me because for me, it's kind of the opposite. I was deeply religious the first half of my life. But eventually, I found it was the non-religious people in my life who challenged me to grow. And I find that many of the most religious people I know are frustratingly limited in the things they're willing to learn and think, to things that don't significantly challenge the particular edifices of their faith. To be clear, this can be true of non-religious people, too.
That's kinda my process as well. The next step was to be curious and ask those people - you are so smart how are you engaging with this thing that makes no sense to me at all. They may give an interesting perspective.
The real question is it better to lie to yourself and believe in something that is simply not true? Or to be true to yourself and deal with the loneliness that is existence.
To me the choice to clear- be true to yourself. In that sense, organized religion has no place in this world.
I think you're mistaking (along with many people including many religious people themselves), what religion's purpose actually is.
IMO, religion isn't really about truth, or "there is an afterlife", or "there's a magical almighty person(s) out there". Rather, it's mostly just a bunch of advice, principles and curated wisdom passed down from generation and generation to help people live a happy, meaningful life.
Like "you shall not kill", or "you shall not steal" or "treat your neighbor like you would yourself" - are arguably good principles to follow if you want to live in a peaceful society free from violence, as obeying these rules minimizes desire for anyone to have vengeance upon their neighbor. Or take Buddhism, which preaches that nirvana is absence of desire and craving, which shows that sometimes your own greed and ambitions can be the cause of your suffering, and by simply being grateful, can bring you happiness.
In this sense, I think it's valuable and has a place in the world. I mean, are we alone in existence, and is death the end? I think so, but if it makes some people feel better thinking otherwise is possible, then what's wrong with letting them believe or put hope into that?
So to me, religion isn't so much about "what is true and not true", but more rather: "here's some wisdom on how to lead an enjoyable life".
Now I am seeing that often it's us the non-religious that have lost something of value and are trying to replace it with things that don't work as well.