That's me in the corner, losing my religion

[Ensign_Edison]

@vivalostwages

Have you read The End of Faith by Sam Harris? He addresses this sort of problem, among many others, in the book.

Not yet, but thank you, I will check it out. Can you summarise its point?

@nevermore

I thought that for awhile. I just eventually came to the conclusion that I had about equal evidence for the Buddy God and the Fearsome Arbitrary God either way, which was about zero.

Since you bring it up again, I’d like to address this. I believe that faith (and irrationalty/mysticism/mythmaking/ritual/etc) is valuable precisely because it can’t be proven with evidence. I think the human mind is designed to reach beyond reason, and that it’s kept in good shape by nonsense and imagination. For some of us, the seat of that holy play is called God. For others, there are other ways that feel comfortable.

A book I’d recommend anyone is Why People Believe Weird Things by the highly respected skeptic Michael Shermer. (Yeah - I’m a queer liberal religionist skeptic. You wanna fight about it? ;j ) He writes about how the ‘mistakes’ we make in thinking are generated by the same mental machine that helps us think clearly.

Take pareidolia, fr’instance, the tendecy to see familiar shapes in random patterns. We’re so good at pattern-matching we actually do it too much. Is God just the result of humankind’s pareidolia when it looks out at the stars? Well…perhaps, certainly. But I don’t think we’re this inclined to see God for no good reason at all - dig me, nevermore?

Maybe it’s just an accident, like so many other significant genetic accidents in evolution (at least the Church does embrace that). But for me it’s a happy accident, if so, because it has added a rich mystery to my life that I wouldn’t want to go without.

Terrible things have been done in the name of religion, but humankind specializes in giving cause to its whims and obsessions. For a while now, I’ve thought that mostly, people do what they do, regardless; without religion, or economics, or liberty as excuses, they would have found some other banner under which to march.

Of course, identity itself is becoming the issue now, and isn’t that a hoot? I could go wave a flag in a parade merely on the basis of who I am, not what I do, or what I think, or what I own, or where I live. Religion, too, like sexuality, like gender, like politics, has become an issue of identity. Maybe this is the trap I’ve fallen into; maybe I am trying to make a God-shaped box for me to live in, and what I need to do is step back and let the miracle unfold around me.

Er…I’m just going to hit submit reply now before I feel shy again and change my mind

[Acsenray]

@Ensign Edison

Okay, atheists. This is where I ask you to step up too, because all of the above really has me thinking. Let me ask you this, if you’re reading this: Do any of you have to maintain your atheism in the face of a strong feeling of belief in God that you reject as irrational and possibly dangerous?

My non-belief has never been shaken by any statement of belief by any believer. The whole idea of belief in the supernatural strikes me as an unnecessary complication in one’s life. I accept that universe is complicated, that people are complicated, and that there may be a lot of things I will never understand. None of that triggers in me any instinct to search for “deeper answers” or anything like that. I just accept it. Things happen and they can affect individuals positively or negatively. What matters is human intent and action. The rest is merely the canvas on which we paint our lives.

Sometimes as an exercise, I assume that there is a god (usually of the Christian variety). In such a situation, the universe becomes not just complicated and difficult to understand, but entirely incomprehensible and inconceivable. To me, nothing about the world makes any sense at all if you assume that there is an ultimate creator with the qualities of omnipotence, omniscience, and goodness.

Sometimes the rise of religion in political life has led me to wonder whether I’d be better off pretending to be a believer of some kind, but I don’t think I’d be able to pull it off convincingly. It really has no meaning for me whatsoever.

[Cat_Whisperer]

While we’re recommending books, I’d also like to recommend “Job: A Comedy Of Justice” by Robert A. Heinlein. If you weren’t scared by the rise of rabid Fundamentalism before, you will be after.

[vivalostwages]

@Ensign Edison

Not yet, but thank you, I will check it out. Can you summarise its point?
snip

I’ll try… Its subtitle is “Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason.”

He discusses how people’s beliefs, especially when allowed to go unchallenged and unexamined, can lead them to kill themselves or others; how religious faith is often undermined by the irrational; and a lot more. (I am paraphrasing some of the blurbs.)

As a companion piece to Heinlein, how about Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale ?

[cwthree]

@Spatial Rift 47

I was raised Jewish. It was a few years ago now, maybe five or six, when I was in high school, that I lost whatever remnants of religion I had remaining. I know not how the thought came to me to do this, but I decided to conduct an experiment. During the Yom Kippur service, the most holy of days for the Jews, the cantor sings a particularly poignant prayer, the Hineni, in which he supplicates himself before the Lord as unworthy of leading the congregation. He begins the prayer at the rear of the sanctuary and slowly progresses back to his station on the small raised area at the front (called the bima). I decided to note exactly where in the prayer the cantor was when he first reached the stairs leading up to that area. Twice, three separate times he managed to be at the exact same word as he placed his foot on the first step. This was no poignant prayer – this was a performance. Suddenly I realized that the bima was naught but a stage, the rabbi and cantor the players, and the congregation the audience. Since that day I cannot participate in such pageantry.

I was touched by this, and I’ve been trying to formulate a response. I can imagine several people, each noticing this and reacting differently. You noticed this, and felt that it gave the ritual a theatrical quality (and a superficiality?) that diminished the spiritual value of the event.

Someone else might have noticed this and seen it as evidence of the cantor’s immersion in the ritual. This person might have thought, “He’s so careful and so mindful of what he’s doing that he does it exactly the same way every time.”

Yet another person might have noticed and seen it as evidence that the cantor wasn’t into the ritual, not even enough to try to look like he was into it. This person might have thought, “He’s done this so many times he’s gone on autopilot. I wonder if he’s even paying attention to the prayer, or if he’s just wishing this would hurry up and be done already?”

[Bongmaster]

Like many others I was raised Roman Catholic and began drifting away from the church around puberty. I have sought a higher purpose since then and at age 33 I know without a doubt that it will not be with any popular organized religion. In my mind all major religions seem absurd in the claims they make. No one on this planet has the slightest clue about what happens when you die. I don’t, Osama certainly doesn’t, and your local priest is guessing too…we all are. To pick a religion and convince yourself that you’ve done the right thing is the height of folly in my opinion. No one can get past the argument that you simply don’t know what the truth really is. You can pretend, you can have “faith”, and you can delude yourself into believing it so much that you are willing to sacrifice your life and the lives of innocents to prove it…but ultimately that guy knows no more than I do, he just thinks he does.

So my advice is to stay far away from traditional organzied religion and study some philosophy. Figure out what makes the most sense to you about the universe we live in and believe that…but take it with a grain of salt.