10 ms·

Religion without belief

33 points by kawera 10y ago

eyelidlessness 10y ago
> Are they religious or secular? Secular, obviously. If you believe the ritual negates this, you're redefining terms to suit your prejudices.
- helthanatos 10y ago
  But we also have to bring into question Christians that claim they are Christian but do not act like they are. Those people may claim to be religious, but they are clearly not. Does having no belief in your religion but still participating in some things mean you aren't religious at all? Really, most of this is about definition vs. Practice. Agnostics can be considered atheists in practice but their definitions differ a bit.
  - 2muchcoffeeman 10y ago
    Surely the only thing necessary to be Christian is belief in Christ and that he is our saviour or whatever?
    - dpeck 10y ago
      Tolstoy, among others, would disagree.
    - Alex3917 10y ago
      A more clear example would be that in the U.S., most people claim to be either theists or atheists. But in fact very few of them are actually telling the truth, in that most of them are neither theists or atheists, but that's just how they self-identify for whatever reasons. The point is that whether people self-identify as being religious or not has basically zero correlation with whether or not people are actually religious. E.g. the media often claims that atheism/non-religious/SBNR is the fastest growing religion, but there isn't really any strong evidence to support that.
      - eyelidlessness 10y ago
        > But in fact very few of them are actually telling the truth, in that most of them are neither theists or atheists, but that's just how they self-identify for whatever reasons. Orly? What's the truth?
        Alex3917 10y ago
        If you're asking whether there's some other category they fall into, not necessarily.
        eyelidlessness 10y ago
        You said "very few of them are actually telling the truth". I'm asking what's the truth.
        Alex3917 10y ago
        Just that they're neither atheists or theists. I.e. you're not really a theist unless you believe in an anthropomorphic god, just believing in an abstract conception of god isn't enough. And similarly you're not really an atheist unless you wouldn't believe in god even if you saw him, a position which even Richard Dawkins admits is untenable.
        eyelidlessness 10y ago
        > you're not really a theist unless you believe in an anthropomorphic god, just believing in an abstract conception of god isn't enough This is based on a pretty specific set of jargon that most people probably don't even consider. I have a hard time believing that there's enough evidence either way to say whether more people who claim they're theists are actually deists, but it doesn't serve any purpose to conclude either way. As far as colloquial usage is concerned, there are a lot of people who are honest in their conviction as believers in "god" in some form or another, even if it isn't as specific as you'd like it to be for the purposes of that classification. > And similarly you're not really an atheist unless you wouldn't believe in god even if you saw him That's just... I don't even know how to address that. Your first claim was extremely specific and conforms pretty closely to very well defined criteria, but this one drifts much further from the same set of criteria. > a position which even Richard Dawkins admits is untenable I wouldn't be surprised. Literally no one would find it tenable. Not even Richard Dawkins, who is wrong about nearly everything he says outside his professional career.
    - jacalata 10y ago
      Nope! For an interesting look at "what is a Christian", you might like reading about the question "are Mormons Christian?" Mormons say they are, but other Christian churches say they are not - here's an example argument http://www.patheos.com/blogs/bibleandculture/2012/08/27/why-mormons-are-not-christians-the-issue-of-christology/ http://www.patheos.com/blogs/bibleandculture/2012/08/27/why-...
  - eyelidlessness 10y ago
    I don't think we need to define anything for anyone. If you identify as areligious but engage in rituals associated with one or more religions, you're areligious. If you identify as Christian but never attend services, you're Christian. If you're unsure whether there's a god or not... well it's actually hard to even be inconsistent with that, so pretty much that has to be taken on faith. I have a friend who prays before every meal, but has never held religious belief. Who the fuck is any one of us to tell them they believe something they don't?
    - EdHominem 10y ago
      If your friend prays, obviously they believe there's a reason to do so. The same as if they took vitamin supplements. > Who the fuck is any one of us to tell them they believe something they don't? Who the fuck is any of us to kick down their door and yell it at them? Nobody here is doing that though. In fact, that's something religious people do to areligious people. But who are we to use the correct terminology to ourselves? Thinking beings. What's it to you?
      - eyelidlessness 10y ago
        > If your friend prays, obviously they believe there's a reason to do so. The same as if they took vitamin supplements. Maybe so. Do you know what that reason is? Are you confident in that knowledge? Would you be willing to contradict my friend if he said otherwise? > But who are we to use the correct terminology to ourselves? Thinking beings. What's it to you? How is correctness determined? If we are discussing what other people believe, we are not in a position to define it for them. We can do all sorts of other kinds of analysis: understanding how the specific beliefs affect the believer's actions; understanding the impact of those actions on the world; understanding the way those beliefs intersect with and influence other beliefs. But it is not up to us to assign belief systems to others, even if what we perceive about their beliefs or their actions doesn't conform to our idea of how beliefs work.
        EdHominem 10y ago
        > Maybe so. Do you know what that reason is? I don't have to. But something motivated him to act, and if he's consistent he must believe it's important. > Would you be willing to contradict my friend if he said otherwise? Yeah. Of course. The same as if he said anything else obviously counterfactual. I don't care to, because your friend isn't my windmill, but... > How is correctness determined? If we are discussing what other people believe, we are not in a position to define it for them. We don't need to. The original goalposts are merely that your friend believes or not. > But it is not up to us to assign belief systems to others, "You, you'll be Muslim", "you, Hindu", etc. Funny, but that's not what we're doing. We're pointing to someone praying and saying there must be a reason. Anything less would be denying your friend's humanity. I'm sure that he has what feels like a good reason for what he does...
hprotagonist 10y ago
>Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship-be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible 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 own 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 plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already-it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power-you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart-you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on. Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race"-the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing. --http://bulletin.kenyon.edu/x4280.html http://bulletin.kenyon.edu/x4280.html
andrewfromx 10y ago
alan watts said this best. You can walk into a eastern temple and enjoy it. laugh. do all the "silly" little rituals. Religion is _supposed_ to be fun and NOT serious. The min you make it deadly seriously and tell children THIS IS REAL you defeat the point. i.e. life is one big ride and silly. Life is very very silly and not even a little bit serious. Even when people die. Espeically when people die. Live your life this way and you won't fear death. You'll enjoy your silly number of X years you get on earth and want to live a good life cuz that's the most silly fun you can have. And _that's_ how you get people to be "reglious". NOT BY PREACHING or saying do this "moral" behavior. No no no. Live it up. Go to Burning Man. Enjoy the ride is what religion was trying to tell us but the message is all mixed up now.
- DGAP 10y ago
  Life is very silly when you're the kind of person who tends to read HN. For others, in this age and throughout history, life is not so silly, but quite serious and scary. Through common cultural themes like shared religions, communities can band together and survive. If I stop practicing my Judaism tomorrow, there will still be those who want to kill me for being a Jew - my life will not get more "silly" by losing my religion.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- cmurf 10y ago
  I think this is completely culturally and moronically ignorant to such an extreme degree. You wish this were true. I wish it were true. But it's complete, utter, bollocks. Life is one big ride and silly? Are you fucking high? You've traveled no where. You've read no history at all whatsoever. Yeah, what's going on in Syria is silly. Being drawn and quartered is one big ride. What the fuck ever. Idiot. You clearly got Alan Watts wrong.
  - ctrlalt_g 10y ago
    I don't understand people who call themselves clowns and calls everyone else clowns as well, then expects to be taken seriously.
joneil 10y ago
> for the concept of religion to remain a useful cross-cultural category it must be shorn of its Abrahamic assumptions and understood to refer to a range of concepts and traditions that not only cluster around supernatural beliefs, but also practices, like rituals and festivals. I've been finding it interesting to look even at the Abrahamic traditions - what parts of the ritual / lifestyle / faith are valuable, even if you assume the supernatural claims are bogus? On this topic I've been enjoying the work of Peter Rollins [1]. One of the points he makes is that often we desire certainty in our beliefs, and feel safe with certainty. And it's interesting to watch someone swing from being certain of the existence of a god, to being certain of the non-existence. What they believe has changed ("A god does exist" / "A god does not exist") but how they believe it is much the same ("I'm sure of this because of _____"). I guess that's the difference between being an (a)theist and an agnostic. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Rollins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Rollins
- ajmurmann 10y ago
  I think that entire conversation has been spoiled by the organized abrahamic religions. More often than not when we say "religious" or "believe in god" we are referring to the concepts described by these religions in overly vague and at the same time overly specific terms. Do I believe that wine turns into Jesus blood, humans lived with dinosaurs, some guy talked to god who appeared as a burning bush or anything like that? Hell no! To me those stories are en par with fairy tales and all somewhere on the spectrum between opposing things we know as a fact and things that are so incredibly unlikely that they aren't any more worth thinking about than anything I might just make up or read in a sci-fi novel. In fact I think that it's scary that there are people who actually believe that those things are true. So in almost all conversations I will identify myself as a vehement atheist. At the same time I have no idea if there aren't incredibly powerful beings somewhere that have the power to create whole universes that many would describe as gods. I also don't exclude the possibility that the universe is sentient or maybe even mankind or the entire earth is a sentient organism of some kind. Maybe the entire universe is a giant computer or simulation run by some more advanced beings. If those things were true they probably could be compared to religions believes. However, I have trouble calling myself agnostic. I think that that theoretically would make me agnostic. However, I have a hard time calling myself that because I am so repulsed by the naive fairy tales commonly associated with religion. At the same time I also don't think it's worth devoting much effort to thinking about these things, since they are questions that tend to make no predictions that we can proof or disproof. I find it disturbing that society approves so much of asking childish questions like "where do we come from?", "where will we go?", etc. It's obviously just a mental rabbit hole and there are no real answers to these questions and anyone who claims to have answers to these is a liar or a fool. Unfortunately the big religions claim to have these answers. To me that makes any nuanced discussion about "religion" almost impossible with most people including myself, since I first and foremost want to distance myself from fairy tales. Edit: Typo "there" -> "they" + clarification.
barrkel 10y ago
If we broaden our definition of religion, it loses much of its descriptive power, and we'll have to invent a new word to describe the Abrahamic religions with their jealous God, which define clear in-groups and out-groups, that define modes of clothing and ritual that mark out believers and non-believers, that require some kind of sacrifice to belong, and that are fundamentally underpinned by the idea of a Covenant, a contract that rewards people for following the tenets and punishes those who don't. Personally, I think religion is a fine word for this. I'd rather keep it that way. Ritual without belief and concomitant warm fuzzies of doing the Right Thing is something else.
- meric 10y ago
  Conforming to ritual is a method of ego/identity-destruction on the path of mysticism. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haqiqa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haqiqa
- sriku 10y ago
  This seems a strange stance given how've already generalized it in day to day communication even in the tech world with its own religious wars.
  - barrkel 10y ago
    I don't think so; I believe my definition also applies to e.g. Apple device ownership and Green ideology.
- gnipgnip 10y ago
  That's a very interesting observation. I'd had to read an eye-opening book called "The Heathen in his Blindness" [1] to understand the cultural grounding I stand on. As an Indian, whose own mother tongue has been neglected by the neo-colonial state, and thus whose own epistemological roots are muddied up with those from an over-bearing English imposition, it has become very difficult for me to see the difference between Abrahamic traditions and the contemporary Indian ones (in the city atleast). The latter simply don't make sense anymore (which is likely why a lot of people are irreligious). On the other hand, more than half of the traditional schools in India don't believe in a creator, and it's not clear if any of them actually believe the "devas" (godlings?) exist. Buddhism for instance borrows heavily from the Indian pantheon of devas, but expressedly keeps mum about their existence; those on the "Astika" side like Mimansa, while attesting the grounding of the Vedas, don't believe in the existence or literal use of many of the categories in contemporary Hindu life. Other than these, there was also a school of determinism (slaughtered off by Ashoka), a (much maligned) materialist school, along with who knows how many others - many of them were atheistic (in the Abrahamic sense). I'm not even sure what the semantics of "creator" is in the Sanskrit literature; there is a lot it, but its study is seen with utter contempt (centers of Indic study are now in N.Y, Heidelberg and Kyoto). Likewise, Yoga, meditation... gained mass appeal in India, after they took off in the West. Edit: Updated for clarity.
swayvil 10y ago
If you assume that religion isn't just a club for ideologues, what you get is more of a research-program. There's a technique, there's a mystery, you do the technique to address the mystery. Techniques : meditation, fasting, hallucinogens. Mysteries : God, Tao, Ultimate Reality. Given the lack of technique in most of what we call religion these days, I think what we're looking at is a degenerate form of something that was pretty cool once upon a time. What we've got is basically fanfic.
- ajmurmann 10y ago
  I think what you describe would nowadays better be described as "spirituality". The term "religion" has mostly been hijacked by organizations that give you a book and claim they are the only ones to have the authority to interpret it or worse claim it has to be taken literally and interpretation is a sin. It's all very sad.
- flogic 10y ago
  There's more to it than that though. Christianity for example exists in multiple aspect in people's lives. The aspect you're talking about is the actual belief. But there are other aspects. There is a set of traditions and ceremonies that people perform. There are the local communities. There is a set of values. Then there are the overarching organizations. And at the same time, there is a set of mental tools for reasoning about things that while they look like belief may not be. All of these fit into a ball of mud that can be called religion.
- gnipgnip 10y ago
  Very well put :) (although it probably doesn't fit the Abrahamic conception, practice and history).
  - swayvil 10y ago
    That would be a case of the fanfic becoming the authority. Like a robot turning on its creators.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
known 10y ago
Your Beliefs Doesn't Make You A Better Person; Your Behavior Does;
known 10y ago
"Earth is flat" --Religion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_earth

33 points by kawera 10y ago

> Are they religious or secular? Secular, obviously. If you believe the ritual negates this, you're redefining terms to suit your prejudices.

helthanatos 10y ago
But we also have to bring into question Christians that claim they are Christian but do not act like they are. Those people may claim to be religious, but they are clearly not. Does having no belief in your religion but still participating in some things mean you aren't religious at all? Really, most of this is about definition vs. Practice. Agnostics can be considered atheists in practice but their definitions differ a bit.
- 2muchcoffeeman 10y ago
  Surely the only thing necessary to be Christian is belief in Christ and that he is our saviour or whatever?
  - dpeck 10y ago
    Tolstoy, among others, would disagree.
  - Alex3917 10y ago
    A more clear example would be that in the U.S., most people claim to be either theists or atheists. But in fact very few of them are actually telling the truth, in that most of them are neither theists or atheists, but that's just how they self-identify for whatever reasons. The point is that whether people self-identify as being religious or not has basically zero correlation with whether or not people are actually religious. E.g. the media often claims that atheism/non-religious/SBNR is the fastest growing religion, but there isn't really any strong evidence to support that.
    - eyelidlessness 10y ago
      > But in fact very few of them are actually telling the truth, in that most of them are neither theists or atheists, but that's just how they self-identify for whatever reasons. Orly? What's the truth?
      - Alex3917 10y ago
        If you're asking whether there's some other category they fall into, not necessarily.
        eyelidlessness 10y ago
        You said "very few of them are actually telling the truth". I'm asking what's the truth.
        Alex3917 10y ago
        Just that they're neither atheists or theists. I.e. you're not really a theist unless you believe in an anthropomorphic god, just believing in an abstract conception of god isn't enough. And similarly you're not really an atheist unless you wouldn't believe in god even if you saw him, a position which even Richard Dawkins admits is untenable.
        eyelidlessness 10y ago
        > you're not really a theist unless you believe in an anthropomorphic god, just believing in an abstract conception of god isn't enough This is based on a pretty specific set of jargon that most people probably don't even consider. I have a hard time believing that there's enough evidence either way to say whether more people who claim they're theists are actually deists, but it doesn't serve any purpose to conclude either way. As far as colloquial usage is concerned, there are a lot of people who are honest in their conviction as believers in "god" in some form or another, even if it isn't as specific as you'd like it to be for the purposes of that classification. > And similarly you're not really an atheist unless you wouldn't believe in god even if you saw him That's just... I don't even know how to address that. Your first claim was extremely specific and conforms pretty closely to very well defined criteria, but this one drifts much further from the same set of criteria. > a position which even Richard Dawkins admits is untenable I wouldn't be surprised. Literally no one would find it tenable. Not even Richard Dawkins, who is wrong about nearly everything he says outside his professional career.
  - jacalata 10y ago
    Nope! For an interesting look at "what is a Christian", you might like reading about the question "are Mormons Christian?" Mormons say they are, but other Christian churches say they are not - here's an example argument http://www.patheos.com/blogs/bibleandculture/2012/08/27/why-mormons-are-not-christians-the-issue-of-christology/ http://www.patheos.com/blogs/bibleandculture/2012/08/27/why-...
- eyelidlessness 10y ago
  I don't think we need to define anything for anyone. If you identify as areligious but engage in rituals associated with one or more religions, you're areligious. If you identify as Christian but never attend services, you're Christian. If you're unsure whether there's a god or not... well it's actually hard to even be inconsistent with that, so pretty much that has to be taken on faith. I have a friend who prays before every meal, but has never held religious belief. Who the fuck is any one of us to tell them they believe something they don't?
  - EdHominem 10y ago
    If your friend prays, obviously they believe there's a reason to do so. The same as if they took vitamin supplements. > Who the fuck is any one of us to tell them they believe something they don't? Who the fuck is any of us to kick down their door and yell it at them? Nobody here is doing that though. In fact, that's something religious people do to areligious people. But who are we to use the correct terminology to ourselves? Thinking beings. What's it to you?
    - eyelidlessness 10y ago
      > If your friend prays, obviously they believe there's a reason to do so. The same as if they took vitamin supplements. Maybe so. Do you know what that reason is? Are you confident in that knowledge? Would you be willing to contradict my friend if he said otherwise? > But who are we to use the correct terminology to ourselves? Thinking beings. What's it to you? How is correctness determined? If we are discussing what other people believe, we are not in a position to define it for them. We can do all sorts of other kinds of analysis: understanding how the specific beliefs affect the believer's actions; understanding the impact of those actions on the world; understanding the way those beliefs intersect with and influence other beliefs. But it is not up to us to assign belief systems to others, even if what we perceive about their beliefs or their actions doesn't conform to our idea of how beliefs work.
      - EdHominem 10y ago
        > Maybe so. Do you know what that reason is? I don't have to. But something motivated him to act, and if he's consistent he must believe it's important. > Would you be willing to contradict my friend if he said otherwise? Yeah. Of course. The same as if he said anything else obviously counterfactual. I don't care to, because your friend isn't my windmill, but... > How is correctness determined? If we are discussing what other people believe, we are not in a position to define it for them. We don't need to. The original goalposts are merely that your friend believes or not. > But it is not up to us to assign belief systems to others, "You, you'll be Muslim", "you, Hindu", etc. Funny, but that's not what we're doing. We're pointing to someone praying and saying there must be a reason. Anything less would be denying your friend's humanity. I'm sure that he has what feels like a good reason for what he does...

hprotagonist 10y ago

>Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship-be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible 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 own 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 plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already-it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power-you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart-you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on. Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race"-the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing. --http://bulletin.kenyon.edu/x4280.html http://bulletin.kenyon.edu/x4280.html

andrewfromx 10y ago

alan watts said this best. You can walk into a eastern temple and enjoy it. laugh. do all the "silly" little rituals. Religion is _supposed_ to be fun and NOT serious. The min you make it deadly seriously and tell children THIS IS REAL you defeat the point. i.e. life is one big ride and silly. Life is very very silly and not even a little bit serious. Even when people die. Espeically when people die. Live your life this way and you won't fear death. You'll enjoy your silly number of X years you get on earth and want to live a good life cuz that's the most silly fun you can have. And _that's_ how you get people to be "reglious". NOT BY PREACHING or saying do this "moral" behavior. No no no. Live it up. Go to Burning Man. Enjoy the ride is what religion was trying to tell us but the message is all mixed up now.

DGAP 10y ago
Life is very silly when you're the kind of person who tends to read HN. For others, in this age and throughout history, life is not so silly, but quite serious and scary. Through common cultural themes like shared religions, communities can band together and survive. If I stop practicing my Judaism tomorrow, there will still be those who want to kill me for being a Jew - my life will not get more "silly" by losing my religion.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
cmurf 10y ago
I think this is completely culturally and moronically ignorant to such an extreme degree. You wish this were true. I wish it were true. But it's complete, utter, bollocks. Life is one big ride and silly? Are you fucking high? You've traveled no where. You've read no history at all whatsoever. Yeah, what's going on in Syria is silly. Being drawn and quartered is one big ride. What the fuck ever. Idiot. You clearly got Alan Watts wrong.
- ctrlalt_g 10y ago
  I don't understand people who call themselves clowns and calls everyone else clowns as well, then expects to be taken seriously.

joneil 10y ago

> for the concept of religion to remain a useful cross-cultural category it must be shorn of its Abrahamic assumptions and understood to refer to a range of concepts and traditions that not only cluster around supernatural beliefs, but also practices, like rituals and festivals. I've been finding it interesting to look even at the Abrahamic traditions - what parts of the ritual / lifestyle / faith are valuable, even if you assume the supernatural claims are bogus? On this topic I've been enjoying the work of Peter Rollins [1]. One of the points he makes is that often we desire certainty in our beliefs, and feel safe with certainty. And it's interesting to watch someone swing from being certain of the existence of a god, to being certain of the non-existence. What they believe has changed ("A god does exist" / "A god does not exist") but how they believe it is much the same ("I'm sure of this because of _____"). I guess that's the difference between being an (a)theist and an agnostic. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Rollins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Rollins

ajmurmann 10y ago
I think that entire conversation has been spoiled by the organized abrahamic religions. More often than not when we say "religious" or "believe in god" we are referring to the concepts described by these religions in overly vague and at the same time overly specific terms. Do I believe that wine turns into Jesus blood, humans lived with dinosaurs, some guy talked to god who appeared as a burning bush or anything like that? Hell no! To me those stories are en par with fairy tales and all somewhere on the spectrum between opposing things we know as a fact and things that are so incredibly unlikely that they aren't any more worth thinking about than anything I might just make up or read in a sci-fi novel. In fact I think that it's scary that there are people who actually believe that those things are true. So in almost all conversations I will identify myself as a vehement atheist. At the same time I have no idea if there aren't incredibly powerful beings somewhere that have the power to create whole universes that many would describe as gods. I also don't exclude the possibility that the universe is sentient or maybe even mankind or the entire earth is a sentient organism of some kind. Maybe the entire universe is a giant computer or simulation run by some more advanced beings. If those things were true they probably could be compared to religions believes. However, I have trouble calling myself agnostic. I think that that theoretically would make me agnostic. However, I have a hard time calling myself that because I am so repulsed by the naive fairy tales commonly associated with religion. At the same time I also don't think it's worth devoting much effort to thinking about these things, since they are questions that tend to make no predictions that we can proof or disproof. I find it disturbing that society approves so much of asking childish questions like "where do we come from?", "where will we go?", etc. It's obviously just a mental rabbit hole and there are no real answers to these questions and anyone who claims to have answers to these is a liar or a fool. Unfortunately the big religions claim to have these answers. To me that makes any nuanced discussion about "religion" almost impossible with most people including myself, since I first and foremost want to distance myself from fairy tales. Edit: Typo "there" -> "they" + clarification.

barrkel 10y ago

If we broaden our definition of religion, it loses much of its descriptive power, and we'll have to invent a new word to describe the Abrahamic religions with their jealous God, which define clear in-groups and out-groups, that define modes of clothing and ritual that mark out believers and non-believers, that require some kind of sacrifice to belong, and that are fundamentally underpinned by the idea of a Covenant, a contract that rewards people for following the tenets and punishes those who don't. Personally, I think religion is a fine word for this. I'd rather keep it that way. Ritual without belief and concomitant warm fuzzies of doing the Right Thing is something else.

meric 10y ago
Conforming to ritual is a method of ego/identity-destruction on the path of mysticism. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haqiqa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haqiqa
sriku 10y ago
This seems a strange stance given how've already generalized it in day to day communication even in the tech world with its own religious wars.
- barrkel 10y ago
  I don't think so; I believe my definition also applies to e.g. Apple device ownership and Green ideology.
gnipgnip 10y ago
That's a very interesting observation. I'd had to read an eye-opening book called "The Heathen in his Blindness" [1] to understand the cultural grounding I stand on. As an Indian, whose own mother tongue has been neglected by the neo-colonial state, and thus whose own epistemological roots are muddied up with those from an over-bearing English imposition, it has become very difficult for me to see the difference between Abrahamic traditions and the contemporary Indian ones (in the city atleast). The latter simply don't make sense anymore (which is likely why a lot of people are irreligious). On the other hand, more than half of the traditional schools in India don't believe in a creator, and it's not clear if any of them actually believe the "devas" (godlings?) exist. Buddhism for instance borrows heavily from the Indian pantheon of devas, but expressedly keeps mum about their existence; those on the "Astika" side like Mimansa, while attesting the grounding of the Vedas, don't believe in the existence or literal use of many of the categories in contemporary Hindu life. Other than these, there was also a school of determinism (slaughtered off by Ashoka), a (much maligned) materialist school, along with who knows how many others - many of them were atheistic (in the Abrahamic sense). I'm not even sure what the semantics of "creator" is in the Sanskrit literature; there is a lot it, but its study is seen with utter contempt (centers of Indic study are now in N.Y, Heidelberg and Kyoto). Likewise, Yoga, meditation... gained mass appeal in India, after they took off in the West. Edit: Updated for clarity.

swayvil 10y ago

If you assume that religion isn't just a club for ideologues, what you get is more of a research-program. There's a technique, there's a mystery, you do the technique to address the mystery. Techniques : meditation, fasting, hallucinogens. Mysteries : God, Tao, Ultimate Reality. Given the lack of technique in most of what we call religion these days, I think what we're looking at is a degenerate form of something that was pretty cool once upon a time. What we've got is basically fanfic.

ajmurmann 10y ago
I think what you describe would nowadays better be described as "spirituality". The term "religion" has mostly been hijacked by organizations that give you a book and claim they are the only ones to have the authority to interpret it or worse claim it has to be taken literally and interpretation is a sin. It's all very sad.
flogic 10y ago
There's more to it than that though. Christianity for example exists in multiple aspect in people's lives. The aspect you're talking about is the actual belief. But there are other aspects. There is a set of traditions and ceremonies that people perform. There are the local communities. There is a set of values. Then there are the overarching organizations. And at the same time, there is a set of mental tools for reasoning about things that while they look like belief may not be. All of these fit into a ball of mud that can be called religion.
gnipgnip 10y ago
Very well put :) (although it probably doesn't fit the Abrahamic conception, practice and history).
- swayvil 10y ago
  That would be a case of the fanfic becoming the authority. Like a robot turning on its creators.

deleted 10y ago

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known 10y ago

Your Beliefs Doesn't Make You A Better Person; Your Behavior Does;

known 10y ago

"Earth is flat" --Religion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_earth