Not really.
I like witchy stuff but only if its considerable to placebos. A rose quartz bracelet, for example, might not be scientifically going to attract love and good fortune—but its cute and makes me happy, so who knows, THAT might help.
If I had to choose a religion though, I’d probably go with one of those polytheist religions because ever since I was a kid and first went to a church camp, I decided that a singular “God” scares the shit out of me. I basically considered “God” too overpowered and decided that wasn’t for me.
Big up for happiness having a positive effect on your life.
I am atheist but I do enjoy religious spaces. There’s a stillness that I like, gives you the opportunity to just be in the moment. You don’t get many spaces like that for atheist folk (libraries are the closest I can think of). I sing a lot of choral music so often find myself in churches. I like the structure of a service and the ceremonial aspect, I just don’t believe in the content itself.
definitely relate to this. i attend church regularly despite not being religious because my family is, and though i don’t believe in the christian god at least, i do appreciate and like the environment, community, and lessons being taught. it’s very peaceful and makes you feel like you’re part of something a bit bigger, even if that’s likely just because there’s a few hundred people at any given service.
Absolutely not.
No, but I also recognize that I may be wrong. To be honest, arrogant atheists bother me even more than arrogant theists.
To me, the whole point is that any answer is impossible to prove. Trying to definitively, factually state that no kind of higher power exists is irrational, and thoroughly undermines any claim of logic or reason. The stubborn, uncompromising kind of atheist frequently describes themselves as a logical, rational person, so I expect them to see this problem.
Not even a little bit. I’m still in awe of the universe, aware of my own insignificance, and terrified yet resigned to my eventual death though!
No. It took me a lot of hard effort to get here with my upbringing. I think parts of it are fine and for the most part regular people practice in ways that aren’t harmful to others, but (at least in the US), the entire structure of it is deeply harmful and results in good, decent folk taking actions or supporting others who do real harm.
Every religious community organisation that I have had first hand personal experience with has been involved in a myriad of verified claims of abuse Including: sexual, financial, and elder. My confidence in these institutions is now nonexistent. And I find myself misidentifying with them completely. I think I am now de facto apathetically agnostic.
It’s complicated. I am not religious, and have considered myself to be an atheist for most of my life so far. I also have strong negative feelings towards most mainstream religions, because of their long-standing hate towards people like me and my loved ones. I also grew up in a Presbyterian church and honestly, fuck everything about calvinist-derived theology.
But, it is hard to shake some amount of magical thinking. And honestly, if it brings joy, and isn’t harming people around you, why not? So lately I’ve been leaning into it a bit, in a vaguely neopagan direction. I definitely don’t take any of it literally, but if a sprinkle of it helps keep me from descending into despondency, I will shrug and go with it. It isn’t rational, but I am a human, not a robot.
I have also considered finding a local unitarian universalist church or something along those lines. Somewhere that is chill with me as I am. The last few years have been isolating and I think I need more community in my life to thrive.
Hell yeah! I’m Hindu and I love it.
I loved mythology as a child and devoured every myth from every culture I could get my hands on. Later this evolved into exploration of religion. I’ve read religious books of many religions - Hindu epics and scriptures, Buddhist scriptures, Jain scriptures, Quran, Bible, Guru Granth Sahib, and the Avesta - I enjoyed them all, and my parents encouraged this exploration.
I ultimately came back to Hinduism because a lot of the stuff in it made sense and resonated with me, and let me adopt a mindset that works well for letting me process and ascribe meaning to the various experiences and phenomenon of life.
Hinduism is a collection of hundreds of belief-systems - a lot of which are uber chill, some literally cult-like, some polticised and weaponised for oppression, and some that are intense but harmless. You can choose what makes sense to you - I personally follow a pretty chill belief system, but it also makes me seem not serious about it.
Oooh and it is fun in the community - festivals, temples, ceremonies, and various cultural events -there are so many of these, and each of them very fun depending on the people involved in the celebration.
See, this is what I legitimately can’t comprehend about religion, you yourself call it mythology. Being a member of a religion requires that you essentially pretend that you’re convinced of this stuff. I can’t comprehend someone literally shopping around and picking how they’re going to view… reality. It’s just reality. It doesn’t work like that.
Hmm, I think “pretend you’re convinced of this stuff” is a long-winded way to say “believe” - belief is an inherent, basic feeling in humans - you believe your loved ones when they say they love you, you believe someone when they ask you to trust you, you believe someone when they claim something about themselves, your dog believes you will come back even though you have disappeared suddenly when you go to work - all of these things happen without you knowing 100% sure what the exact situation is, without you knowing a numerical value for all the stats, or what will exactly happen. Sure, you could base your thinking around probabilities based only on what you have observed or simply just believe things. I think belief is one of the things that seperates setience from sapience.
It’s probably best to seperate a fanatic from a general religious person - I use religion to frame and try make sense of things that I can’t know by pure observation or those that don’t have a straightforward answer - what happens after death, what is purpose, why is there suffering, etc. - in an attempt to look for something other than “it’s all meaningless, everyone and everything happened by pure chance”, plus there are a lot of philosophies and stories that make for good thought experiments.
I can’t comprehend someone literally shopping around and picking how they’re going to view… reality. It’s just reality
It’s also probably best to shed the narrow “Religion = mindless god worship” view - people are complex, as are cultures. Not all religions push aggressively for blind faith and discarding of logic in face of reality (many do, yes, and I’m sure that has shaped your view on religion). In a way, you can think of religion to be positive nihilism for many - ascribing meaning to the meaningless or unexplained.
just a heads up, i’m not sure if the person you’re replying to seems very… interested in a genuine discussion. i’m another comment in this thread they said:
I hate that people willfully delude themselves into believing things that they clearly know to not be true, on some level, and then argue wholeheartedly for their actual truthfulness. It’s the most nonsensical practice I can imagine someone engaging in and I struggle to see people who do so as willful, rational human beings.
which doesn’t exactly seem super open minded imo. but, for the record, i really like how you’ve explained yourself here- as someone who is curious about religion and spirituality but hasn’t found anything to specifically believe in, it’s really nice to see how others reconcile things like “shopping” for a view of the world.
do you think you could elaborate a bit on why you settled into hinduism specifically? i’m not very educated on it, but love hearing others experiences and beliefs :)
Aw that’s a bummer. But based on their full comment, they don’t seem narrow-minded about it just a bit… frustrated? Oh well I can empathise.
Haha thanks for liking it - I’m grateful I got a chance to explore without people being down my throat about it.
Regarding my choice for Hinduism - I guess it all started when I wondered about what happened after death. I grew out of the idea of eternal heaven or hell pretty quickly - started to dislike it a lot, infact - because eternity of consequences for a jiffy of a lifetime seemed too inflexible - so this eliminated the Abrahamic religions, Zoroastrianism, and some ideologies of Hinduism that believed in eternal heaven/hell.
I really liked the concept of reincarnation and karma. It made sense to me. You live a life, and the circumstances and options of your next life are decided based on the deeds of that life - you repeat this cycle until you feel like your soul has experienced all it needs to, and break out of the cycle, complete and one with the world. So the options left were Greek/Roman, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikh.
I didn’t like the Greek gods they seemed more like mortals with power than divine beings. I dropped Sikhism bc it’s monotheistic and I like the idea of multiple gods for everything. Following Jainism sincerely was a bit too extreme for me.
There were other factors like the way each religion described morality, mortal priorities, and ideal way to lead life - I liked some and disliked some, but I mostly avoided religions that were too rigid and inflexible on how daily life was supposed to be lived.
Ultimately, It ended up between Hinduism and Buddhism. I picked Hinduism because of its scriptures - Gita, Mahabharata, and the Upanishads - there’s a looot more but these influenced me a lot. And also because of the flexibility it offered - I could pick a belief system, or make up my own belief system as long as it was in line with the core beliefs of Hinduism, and you could philosophize enough to justify your beliefs (There’s even a school of thought, that believes in the gods but actively chooses to ignore them lol, and it is considered a valid Hindu ideology).
While I identify as Hindu, I haven’t picked a definite school of thought to follow - am currently following a blend of different schools of thought interweaved with my own logic, and haven’t yet solidified my beliefs - I still have a lot of reading left to do.
Ahh, I think I rambled a bit too long, thanks for hearing me out :)
If you’re interested, the short story The Egg by Andy Weir is a fun read - it is by no means a descriptor for any Hindu beliefs, but the concepts and vibes of reincarnation and one-ness of everyone/everything are pretty similar.
thanks for sharing your experience :) i’ve been vaguely interested in pursuing investigation into a religion or belief system for a couple years now, but it can be difficult to find a place to start with a lot of them. there’s so much out there to learn about so many, i think i’ve just gotten a bit paralyzed and ended up ignoring the part of me that really is interested in learning more about different religions.
The ones you’ve listed (Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism, Hinduism, and Greek/Roman) are all actually ones i’ve been particularly interested in, but another hurdle i’ve had for most of them is the language barrier. there’s just a LOT of new terms and names to learn and remember- did you find that you had a similar experience just starting out? was just more exposure and reading what helped get over that little hump?
Jai Sri Ram!
If by ‘spiritual’ is meant to be belief in something that is outside of our current understanding of scientific knowledge, then yes.
Obviously, the scientific fields of inquiry do not have answers to all of humanity’s questions.
So, that would be the sense that I am ‘spiritual’…there are things going on in the immense universe that are outside (or unknown) our collective scientific understanding.
I would go a step further and say that there are many things that science, by nature, cannot answer. For example, what consciousness is and how it arises as a phenomenon.
I think a scientists reply to that would be: the phenomenon of ‘conciousness’ is a result of the complex chemical reactions between clusters of highly organized matter. Science’s ability to answer questions about consciousness is limited only by the precision of our tools and the sophistication of our methods, both of which will only continue to improve. The fact that we are currently limited, in our tools and our methods, is the only reason that other less quantatative methods of understanding consciousness (like philosophy) are more effective.
This is a typical take, but the the hard problem of consciousness has very strenuously denied neuroscientists for well over a century at this point. We know a lot more about the systems of the brain, but no more about the nature of consciousness itself.
It’s still an open debate, some people don’t believe the hard problem is unsolvable, but on every debate there are really smart people who defend absurd positions. The reason I think it is unsolvable is that consciousness is by definition unobservable, except by the subject.
We can know a lot about the brain, neurons and structures etc. But that doesn’t really get us closer to understanding how an aggregation of impulses and chemical signalling takes us from what is essentially inert matter to a brain.
If you’re interested, the book On Purpose by philosopher Michael Ruse has a chapter on it that is succinct and up to date with the latest neuroscience research. I am sure there are better books out there on the subject but I can only recommend what I’ve read.
Thanks, I’ll check it out!
This is pretty much how I feel. I can’t even understand my own thoughts about “creation” let alone explain them to someone else.
In a way I guess that does make it spiritual but not necessarily religious.
Nuh uh. “Losing My Religion” by R.E.M. still feels surreal and sad for my heart.
I was raised particularly southern, like three denomination deep Protestant, (that only existed because some people argued if you should speak in tongues in church or if that would be “distracting from the lawd”.) And my family participated in the activities so I was forced to attend EVERY SUNDAY AND WEDNESDAY NIGHT until I was 18.
I don’t have a lot of good things to say about it. After I realized I only tried to follow it cause of where I was born (and what measure of truth is that?) I started to address each moral question as it came and settle it myself based off of morality I could stomach.
A lack of belief is easy when I’ve seen nothing to believe, in fact I used to feel alone in it. Eventually I realized I cannot fake it, and what reason would there be, what diety would accept it?
Religions have been perverted into a system of manipulation and control of the masses. Granules of truth in each one keep people coming back, but in the end they are like a virus in human consciousness that is designed to control us. I really believe each person can only find real truth by turning inward and deeply exploring their own consciousness.
I disagree with this. Definitely there are many examples of organised religion being perfect case studies of the adage that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But there are also many ways that religious communities support each other and their wider communities, outside just providing a doctrinal “granule of truth”.
Sikhism I think is most famous for this, and I feel like at least where I live whenever something bad happens in the background on the news I see Sikh communities mobilising to render assistance.
Similarly, the denomination I was brought up in (church of christ) have always been oriented, both in theory and practice, around doing community work first and debating doctrine a fairly distant second (also, each church of christ congregation is an independent entity, which I think has probably contributed to it being able to maintain its strong community-first focus over time).
thank you for pointing this out. i understand why some people tend to blanket religion as unrational, cold, hateful, and/or controlling, but it’s really unfair to generalize such a diverse group like that. there’s a lot of religions, boiling them all down to whatever awful thing you hear in the news about one specific religion is pretty bad imo.
I’m spiritual and I guess some would say religious, though I just call it witchy. I was raised by strict parents as an evangelical Christian (Southern Baptist), but that made less and less sense as I grew older and learned more about the world around me.
I found my way to witchcraft, and working with and in nature made way more sense to me. I’m eclectic, and not very into ceremonial magic, but I do believe magic is real, and I believe we all have different paths to take in life. I currently worship Persephone, Hestia, and Loki, and I try to honor other deities where applicable. I’m studying everything I can, and love hearing about other people’s experiences.
love to see a witch in this thread! i was very interested in witchcraft back when i was deconverting from christianity, as a sort of way to wrestle control over my beliefs again, but honestly haven’t touched it much in awhile. i could never really get myself to believe in any of the pagan gods, even though i really wanted to, and still would like to if i could only bring myself to have faith and believe.
tarot is the best thing i’ve taken from that time, i love it as a tool to analyze emotions and thoughts i don’t fully understand, though i don’t use it much these days. i should try and start using it again :)
may i ask what’s driven you to worship those deities in particular? and, if you had to get over a “belief” hump like i’ve failed to, what pushed you to really believe in the old gods?
I did have to get over a belief hump. It was a slow shift from Christianity to where I am now. I felt a lot of guilt at first, and didn’t worship any particular deity. I just worked with energy and tarot, and joined a local group and took their seeker class. I didn’t feel called to work with a particular god, and I was in a place where I couldn’t really do much magic because of who I lived with and rules they had. I was feeling stifled, and I could only do research and read. In order to get through some of that hump, I read anything and everything I could get my hands on. And it really took some deep dive journaling for me to feel more comfortable with the path I was on. Everything just made more sense to me, and I was a lot happier with witchcraft than I had ever been with Christianity. The guilt just kindof faded over time, and I was able to move past it.
Then Persephone’s name just kept showing up everywhere a few years back, including in my apartment. Like a collectible card from Firefly/Serenity constantly showing up around my house, hearing about Wendy Rule’s Persephone album, Then hearing about the Spring Mysteries which go through her/Demeter’s myth. So I started researching her mythos and I really connected with it. She’s not just one thing, She’s both Iron Queen of the Underworld, and soft Maiden of Springtime Blooms. She helps the cycle of life continue and helps people with change. She helped me move away from that living situation where I could practice more freely. She’s someone I needed to hear from at that time due to complicated relationships with my parents, and helped me process going no contact with them. I’m currently trying to work more with plants to work with her energy and honor her. I sometimes get hints that she’s around, a strong whiff of vanilla out of the blue, or a beautiful patch of flowers. (That’s just me though :) Everyone has their own experiences)
Hestia, I started worshipping because she helped me manifest a house - I also like her energy and continue to worship her. She’s warm and comforting. I can honor her whenever I bake, especially for others, or light a candle for her when I celebrate holidays with my found family.
Loki is newer for me - I just feel a pull (Honestly, I’ve felt it for a while) and I’m starting down that path of researching the mythos. I’ve just set up a small altar for them and am going to learn to work with their energy. I’m kindof excited to see where it goes.
I would say if you are truly wanting to work with a deity - research all of their myths and see what you can glean from it and how you can apply their stories to your life. Maybe you just haven’t found the right fit for you, or maybe you did and it was the wrong time.
Technically speaking though - you don’t have to work with deity to do witchcraft. Witchcraft is a craft, and a lot of people work it into their existing religious structure (There are Christian witches, for example). There’s also a lot of people who are agnostic or atheistic witches. Some believe that the pagan gods are archetypes rather than actual beings. They use their stories as tools similar to how you use Tarot! There was a group on Reddit called “SASS Witches”, I don’t know if they’ve relocated at all, but its something you could look into. I know there are a lot more books coming out that aren’t so Wicca-based, too, so there will be more information out there. There’s a lot of different paths to take, and you just have to find yours.
I’m quite drawn to the ritual aspects of religion but there’s another part of me finds it all hopelessly silly.
Ritual can be entirely divorced from theism or a belief in the supernatural. Nothing wrong with creating a secular ritual if it helps you in some way.
I’m a Christian. I’m in a weird state where i’m trying to figure out where my faith sits and trying to find a new congregation I am comfortable with, since there’s so much bad stuff coming from Christians nowadays.
We ended up in a reconciling UMC congregation, which is a big change from the fundie stuff we grew up with. Our congregation has been protested by evangelicals so I think it is doing something right.
I’ve been looking at UMC, presbyterian, and UCOC since some are LGBT affirming and that’s really the big thing I look for (or at least a clear statement that they aren’t discriminatory about gay/bi and trans people). I am trying to dip my toes in, but it’s very different from what I grew up in, with robes and organs and what not. It’s definitely a journey!
I grew up conservative evangelical (like I was a missionary on three continents) and ended up in very progressive and flamboyantly affirming UMC church. I’m agnostic to the existence of an afterlife and believe in God probably 51% of the time. I decided I would only go to a church that I would still be ok with being around those people the 49% of the time I think it’s BS.
UMC congregation has fit the bill. Fully embracing LGBT+ community and accepted science, psychology, etc. Extremely diligent in protecting vulnerable people and children from abuse. They view the Bible as a complicated book of people writing about God, not the inerrant word of God. The purpose is self improvement and community care with Jesus as the example.
