just, btw i'm an atheist, though i'm fascinated by religion in general and might end up looking into pagan faiths, though that would be more for ritual then anything else (i can't bring myself to believe in all powerful deities but nature spirits sort of make sense... i dunno, i just know that both myself and my fellow atheist teen speudo-philosopher would be polytheist if we believed in something, because polytheist religions just make more sense to us) wrote this as an email to someone: Spoiler: bit long so putting here. this is me being... contemplative?????? you have every right to call bullshit to this entire thing. why i don't think my entire raising as a catholic is bullshit. things that are bullshit (in my opinion, i'm using strong language mostly because i'm really irritated because of a thing, and i honestly wish i could have the faith of most christians, just can't bring myself to) there is a divine deity to whom i owe my heart and mind. this divine deity exists jesus was more then a REALLY convincing street preacher being taught that doubt = bad but in the middle of all the various bullshitteries that make up a lot of the church as a whole, i learned some pretty valuable shit. such as, people are worth something because they are people, at least at there very core. LOVE IS IMPORTANT (srly, how do christians forget this, jesus talks about love every other page) not only is love important, but you should feel empathy even for those you consider your enemies. take the story of the good Samaritan for example now a days it's just short hand for being a good person or helping out a stranger (sort of being a good christian used to be shorthand for helping out the less fortunate ect, but has been destroyed because well, you know, CHRISTIANITY) but in it's time the Samaritans were the pariahs, they were the outcasts, they were Jews in Hitler's Germany, or... well... Jews in a lot of different time periods. and the holy men were the ones who left the stranger on the side of the road to die but the Samaritan helped him despite the fact that the person he stopped to help would have considered him dirty. The point of the story is it is often the lowest in society who are the best. and that something as simple as stopping by the side of the road to help a stranger makes you a good person no matter your social caste. that's something Catholicism taught me (sort of anyway, the only place that is catholic where i deliberately learned this instead of picking it out of the mounds of BELIEVE IN THE JESUS was [my catholic school from seventh grade], because [head nun] is a fucking saint, and i don't mean this metaphorically she should be canonized even if that whole thing is bullshit) love it taught me that as a center to my moral self, that i should try my goddamn hardest to chose empathy over anger every single time. obviously this is harder said then done, but that's what i've learned. a story sort of like the samaritan story is this, though it takes place in now. [other nun from that school], my religious ed teacher from my year at the nun school, had no money in a metro station. being a nun she was wearing her habit and she decided to beg, assuming nun=people will give her money. a bit manipulative, but being a nun does not = stupid, or above using what you have to get what you need. the people who ended up giving her the money she needed were two heavily tattooed youths with multicolored hair. my point is that i've somehow managed to pick up from some of the catholics i've interacted with that to be a truly good person you have to look beyond the obvious and acknowledge a person as a fellow human being first and formost. still sort of amazed i got all this while trying to not scream with frustration at the continuous blatant homophobia/sexism/sort of racism i've had to deal with. also [the church i attend at the behest of my parents]'s community is best community, because we get coffee and donuts after church. i'm aware my experience with christianity (namely the it's okay that you have your opinions but i will scream at you/condescend at you if you don't share mine so it's better if you just play along and drink the koolaid uwu aspect) is not everyone's. also i need to stop using christianity and catholocism interchangeably. my dad is episcapalian and everything
I honestly don't get the idea that the very concept of a god existing is bullshit, tbh? Like, I honestly don't think it's at all possible for humans to KNOW either way, so it bothers me deeply when people say there definitely is or isn't one. (Or more.) I know that's not what you meant but it's a pet peeve of mine.
sorry, realize i shouldn't have phrased it that way i don't consider the concept bullshit i shouldn't have used those terms but i consider it dishonest to edit my own posts on here other then to like, snip identity stuff so i'm leaving it up. i wish i could believe in god (sincerely and deeply wish it) i just can't, not with my current emotional/mental headspace. and i personally believe that belief in god has led to some really good things. i wrote this while remembering how i literally cannot discuss my own opinions on this topic in the house without my mom flipping out. i'm not kidding it's more dangerous for me to be out as an atheist to her then as "gay" obviously i came out as gay before my trans realization. so i'm really sorry that how i phrased it annoyed you and i genuinely regret how i phrased it, now, as i've been thinking about it. of course my brain weird is convinced that i sound like one of those fauxpologies seebs and vastderp have to deal with constantly. arg.
No, I understand! It's more of a personal reaction than anything else? Like, back when I still identified as Christian I got a lot of really nasty comments for it online--like, "But Acey, you're so SMART, why do you believe that bullshit?". Stuff like that. So it was more a reaction to things that happened to me than to what you said. I dunno if I'm making sense but yeah. Personally...I think there's some sort of higher power (albeit not one that interferes with day-to-day life), but I also don't think knowing is possible, and I know that I personally don't know for sure. Basically I'm a deist on a personal level and an agnostic on a larger level?
that makes total sense. that's why i play devil's advocate to a friend of mine who often has very visceral reactions to the dumb side of christianity, among other things, but that's a whole other can of worms, moving on. i try not to call beliefs bullshit, the actions however based on those beliefs can be utterly nonsensical i still think jesus is a really cool dude, especially for the time he was living in. until my realization that i don't actually believe in a higher power and my non knowingness is not enough to actually classify as agnostic, i expressed/though i believed in a sort of clockmaker/scientist god. hell i have a story that is sort of what i would believe in atm if i believed in anything, which is a large group of gods. some have given gifts to humanity, mostly related to the sciences (the concept of numbers and the like) but most have chosen a field of study amongst humans, and those are there names. so the theologean, the writer, the poet, the playwrite, the singer, the dancer, the actor, the warrior, the pacifist, the diplomat, ect, ect. that's why i find the muses so fascinating, because they can be interpretted into modern types of literature (calliopse, for example is traditionally the muse of epic poetry, which makes her sort of the muse of the prose-writer now adays in many ways, and so i've called on her semi seriously for inspiration occasionally) like if there are interventionist gods, then they are not purely malevolent or benevolent beings, they swing emotions wise. they have feelings like humans but since they are divine there are greater consequences for their actions, which is their greatest seperation from us (in some faiths they are also immortal, in others gods are only conditionally immortal, like the aesir, (i think, @Morven correct me if i'm totes 100% wrong on this))
I don't have a problem "playing along" with my super religious family but I have huge issues with the atheist community (at least online since I've never seen one offline) which is why I don't think I will ever personally identify as one despite at this point in my life having the same lack-of-belief
that's pretty interesting to think about. my interactions with atheists (specifically one atheist) offline is that he acknoledges that there are things that not believing in god leads to a lack of an easy answer to (especially morally). and he's generally accepting of people's faiths, even though, as someone raised atheist, it appears that sometimes it's hard for him to understand feeling himself (though i may be mischaracterizing what he's said)
I should clarify that I do know atheists in real life, just not a community of atheists ...which is probably for the best
fair enough it's not really something i feel like a community can realy spring up around, since it feels more like about a lack then anything else. sorry not good at verbalizing atm.
that's fine there are online communities, but like you said it's hard to establish a group identity around a lack of something. So from an outsider's perspective it looks like it has to depend on tearing down everyone else to establish itself as a group. Falling hard for the same monkey brain tactics and instincts that they despise so much in order to navigate the world.
Yo, atheist, which used to be more important to me as an identity than it currently is now. I've been involved in a freethinkers club before, and while it's nice to see other people in your group - kind of establishing the same community feeling as christians get in a church - it got a little weird after a while. not necessarily because it was centered around a lack of something (though that probably didn't help either), but more because we had such a wide range of strength of feelings about different things. Like, you get your dawkins atheists, you get your near-pagan atheists, you get your eh-theists...and then you cram them all in one room and make them talk for an hour every two weeks. After the first few meetings of "gosh, it's so nice to talk to people who get it," you start separating out into "whoa, they're really extreme" and "they're not as involved as they should be" I'm less invested in that environment these days. Still don't think god is a thing that exists, but I'm not going to argue the point with most people. Some people need church. Some people need spirituality. Hell, my mom gardens to get her spirit on. Meh.
i agree with the fact that a lot of people need church/god and the like. this is why i feel like, for example, when i homeless person says "god bless" after i've given them something i really think of it as something spiritual. i dunno. yeah that feels like one of those things that can go weird very quickly.
To quote a thing I've seen floating around tumblr a few times - for me, it's less a matter of "does god exist?" than of "then what kind of god is he?" and, by extension, "Do I want that to have power in my life?" And I've never once seen a Christian/Abrahamic-style religious person who can convince me that the god they follow is anything less than horrifying when you strip away the faithful trappings. I'm an atheist not because I believe that God cannot exist, but because I want what I've seen of "God's hand" in my life over my dead body. I'm an atheist because I want to assign responsibility in my life to where it belongs - to me, to other people, even to random acts of nature - rather than some mysterious force that has a "great plan" that I can't comprehend, especially when that plan is "all for the best" and everyone around me is suffering now. Fuck that. Free will all the way down. If I'm factually wrong, I don't actually care, because it's what, to me, is morally right. Refusal to worship a god who excludes anyone from happiness is, IMO, a moral obligation. Atheist communities are almost entirely dudebro circlejerks it's true. (I have a problem playing along with religious family mostly because they don't respect MY beliefs, and I'm at the point where I will compromise on that only when it is my literal life hanging in the balance. Which has actually happened in the last six months so.)
you know how my thing says I'm closeted? Well for me being a closeted pan trans person is less of a thing then being a closet atheist. and yeah. my atheism is the type of i cannot bring myself to worship. but there are people whose faiths have wrought great things and i cannot fault then for it.
