I used to be strictly materialist and atheist. Now I’m pretty spiritual. Don’t necessarily follow a religion and don’t support bigotry but yeah, I’m fairly spiritual now. This is a recent development and I never thought I’d be here like 5 years ago.
I used to be strictly materialist and atheist. Now I’m pretty spiritual. Don’t necessarily follow a religion and don’t support bigotry but yeah, I’m fairly spiritual now. This is a recent development and I never thought I’d be here like 5 years ago.
Idk why we’ve reached the point where anyone saying they’re anything but an atheist has to specify that they aren’t a bigot. Being religious doesn’t make you a bigot and being atheist doesn’t mean you aren’t one either.
I had a similar 180 though, I used to be an atheist but in the last year or so I pivoted into druidism. Turns out following a religion that focuses on spending time in nature helps to get you out of the house when you’re going though a depressive episode.
The main issue is that the cohort of people with megaphones broadcasting their spirituality is virtually entirely comprised of profiteers.
Like all such parasites they follow the pattern of establishing out groups for you to despise, simply because it drives engagement better. Same reason all major social media now attempts to shape you into a being of hatred and impulse. It keeps you stressed and activated so you jump at the opportunity when they offer to let you spend money to blow off some of the steam.
Bigotry as a phenomenon has many origins, but wherever it springs from it ultimately doubles as an inherently appealing strategy for those who wish wring dry their community.
At any rate, as we all sit here dying around the same poisoned watering hole, we see these profiteers dressing just like us while actively dumping the poison in. Ashamed, we feel compelled to proclaim, “I am not them! They only wear my clothes!”
Spirituality is an incredibly comfortable and practical “clothing” for many people. You’re absolutely correct in drawing attention to how bad it sucks that the people who embrace that comfort now feel pained to differentiate themselves from the abusers who pervert their fashion
Yeah, I had a world-shaking 180 for spirituality after I read about Zen Buddhism.
I was a really proud atheist and thought all religions were just believing in something supernatural. Until I actually gave an intellectually honest try at understanding them. Most theistic religions I couldn’t get on board with but after I read Three Pillars of Zen, something just clicked and I joined my local sangha. Also begun to understand a bit more about religiosity in general after, though I’m still not a fan of Abrahamic religions in particular.
You say you were “intellectually honest” so I’m curious what it was about Zen that appealed to that kind of approach?
The way I was introduce to it framed it specifically as not believing in anything you can’t verify in your own direct experience. The book I read ( https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/89766/the-three-pillars-of-zen-by-roshi-philip-kapleau/ ) was actually pretty mercilessly pointing out how much of what I thought to be obviously true was actually just a belief. Meaning what I think is the average westerner experience of the world as explained by science. It didn’t offer me a set of ideas to believe in, it offered me a way of disbelieving anything I couldn’t know for myself to be true.
Like I said it was pretty world shattering. I realized there is a world BEFORE any thought and that is definitely more real than anything I can think about. I joined the local sangha because things got a little weird for me for a time and my friends kinda thought I was going crazy haha but in my perspective they were the ones alarmingly missing something incredibly important. And I still kinda think they are but it’s not my place to try to “convert” them. Since there’s no point. You need to have the active desire to actually understand.
But aren’t there things that you can objectively know to be true? Wouldn’t this just lead to believing whatever you want to believe?
I feel a little timid about trying to answer this because at this point, I know that people can talk about these things intellectually forever and it just won’t… click. It’s so hard to write about too because if I tried to write in a way that very perfectly reflects my experience, the text becomes weird and cumbersome ( and then when I don’t, people try some gotchas like “ahaa but you refer yourself as “I”, doesn’t that mean you still believe in an individual self”, no but writing more precisely gets in the way of the message ).
First, believing whatever I want to believe is definitely a danger and actually you see this a lot in spiritual discourse that leans towards Buddhism, especially via New Age stuff and “McMindfulness”. Many people happily discard the mainstream beliefs but then they get hooked on their idea of what is true. But the merciless approach that Zen Buddhism has is that nothing you think about is totally true. It’s more like a reflection in a mirror ( Interestingly Plato was also alluding to this in his Allegory of The Cave, so this realization isn’t unique to Zen ).
That includes the concept of “objectivity”. Objectivity relies on the idea that there is some external third party to human experience. But once I looked, or more like was forced to face it, I realized that there is no such thing. I can exchange ideas with what appear to be other people and have an agreement. Like we can probably both agree that we’re looking at a screen now. I anticipate an objection here on the “other people”. I don’t know if “other people” exist outside of me but I know that I don’t have control over anything that appears in my mind. Something that I can call “other people” appears, and they have their likes and dislikes and it can be painful if I’m not respectful of that. This is where compassion teachings come in.
Oh and I’m not anti-science at all. Science is great at revealing patterns in the way things appear. Happy to go get my vaccinations and all that.
Tell me you had a certain experience without telling me you had a certain experience.
Were you taught to not talk in certain terms about how your world “shattered”? Because I was.
I was, yes. I think even if I wasn’t I probably wouldn’t use those terms anyway since in online discourse it never looks good.
Okay, thank you for explaining.
I admit I don’t get it, but maybe I’ll consider reading that book. It seems I had a mistaken idea about Buddhism. Or at least Zen Buddhism.
What they describe is similar to the discourse in western philosophy about the mind and the objective reality. There is no way to prove or disprove that the reality exists outside of the mind of the observer, i.e. that solipsism is true or false. But it also follows that solipsism is practically useless. So we must agree that we probably have a shared experience with other people, which we’ll call ‘reality’. Then the question is, how close the experience of one observer is to that of other people. This is where stuff like qualia comes in, which posits that it’s impossible to qualify immediate perceptual experiences, because each person only refers to what they themselves have experienced. It could easily be that one person’s sensory experience and perception of the world is wholly different from that of another person. It seems, though, that in practice we have a shared vocabulary for our perceptions and use that to build our knowledge of the world.
@SenK@lemmy.ca does this sound like an accurate interpretation of your concept?
Somewhat but I have quibbles with solipsism as people very often mistake it for what I’m talking about. Solipsism, as a philosophical position, remains trapped in the duality of “self vs. world,” endlessly debating whether the world is “out there.” Zen, on the other hand, points directly to the experience prior to that division - the awareness in which both “self” and “world” arise as dependent, interrelated appearances. As I said, there is a whole world before thought. Solipsism still operates on the level of thought. Zen takes another step back from that, and that’s a very important distinction. Which unfortunately is very hard to explain because explanation itself is just thoughts. I can’t describe that which is inherently undescribeable.
The deeper point is that the observer itself is just another perception, not a fixed entity having experiences. The shared vocabulary we use isn’t proof of an external world; it’s just what happens when awareness interacts with itself, creating the appearance of separation and then appearing to bridge it with language.
Zen asks, what is true, before you think about it.
Edit: Solipsism is kinda like the immature little brother of Zen that’s (noisily) playing in the same pool but won’t go to the deep end.
I had something similar. I grew up catholic and was very devout until I learned some stuff about myself that made me step away for a while. I expected to come back like a year later and join the episcopalians or something, but I wound up an atheist for several years. During that time I was kinda insufferable about it for a while. Then I started exploring pantheism, earth worship, and ancestor devotion because I’d felt I was missing something without religion and lighting candles to talk to my mom helped me cope with how much of my life she doesn’t get to be there for. Later an acid trip and some exploration would help me delve deeper and find the goddess I primarily pray to these days. Somewhere later I started using the Wiccan holidays because they’re really convenient for solar and seasonal observance and meditation. They also help make it so I don’t wonder where the hell the year went.
So yeah, catholic to atheist to pagan. There are many paths up the mountain, find the path that is best for you and makes you better.
There are LGBT friendly churches run by LGBT Christians. Are they conveniently ignoring certain parts of the Bible? Sure but all Christians do that
Most “spiritual” people adhere to one of the big organized religions, and those kinda suck in general and are rarely content to leave nonbelievers in peace.
The biggest organised religion is realism.
If we’re free to redefine “religion” as we see fit, I declare breathing a religion.
I think some people can be overly smug about their lack of belief, but I don’t think that means it’s akin to a religion
Realism isn’t about lack of belief. Solipsism is about lack of belief. Realism is about an unshakeable faith in the existence of an external world beyond the senses. Soulism is about making the best of the world within one’s senses. Out of the three main approaches to reality, the realists have the most belief, and are most easily cut down by Occam’s razor. That a world beyond our senses exists is an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence. It is nothing to base one’s life around. It is better to work to improve the malleable world within our senses, than to strive for Plato’s world of forms.
The biggest organized religion is breathing
We don’t live in a society that persecutes people for not breathing, but we do live in a society that persecutes people for not believing in reality. Genocides have been committed in the name of reality.
A genocide for not believing in reality?
Yep. Aboriginal folks don’t tend to teach their kids the white idea of reality. I’ve heard from some Indigenous people that their culture (keep in mind, there are many Aboriginal cultures) doesn’t believe in reality at all.
So the white people took Aboriginal kids away from their families and put them in white institutions and with white parents. Took away their language, their culture, their land, and gave them white patriarchal realism instead. And there was a hell of a lot of abuse. Beatings and rape. They called it “civilising” the children.
It was an attempt to exterminate Aboriginal cultures. I call that genocide.
Let me stop you right there bud. Reality is or isn’t. There is no idea about it.
What you’re talking about is racism.
No, reality is a social construct and it’s harmful to people who fall outside of reality as the white cisheteropatriarchy defines it. At various times that category has included trans people, religious minorities, otherkin, gay people, neurodivergents… Fuck reality.
There is too much diversity between different people for one universe to accept us all. That’s why we need a multiverse.
How can you not believe in reality? Do they think we live in the Matrix?
When you’re in a dream, the things happening seem real, but they aren’t. That’s the way it was explained to Me by an indigenous man from the Tiwi Islands.
Science agrees with indigenous metaphysics. Cognitive psychologists have used evolutionary simulations to investigate the origins of perception. Donald Hoffman created a virtual environment and created some virtual creatures to live within in. One creature perceives the environment the way it actually exists. Another creature perceives only fitness payoffs. And fitness beats truth every time. Perceiving reality is a waste of resources that evolution selects against. Our ancestors were the primitive organisms who perceived fitness payoffs, not truth.
The biggest organized religion is breathing
I think we need a secular form of spirituality (be it heathenism, druidism, paganism, etc), so people can still be spiritually fulfilled, while not following some large-ass church that gets corrupted over time, every damn time.
It helps that most people in “the west” are becoming more and more secular (as far as I can tell).
Looking at the entire history of (a) faith-based religion, versus (b) evidence-based science
I have to say:
There’s no denying that most of the major religions are rooted in racism, and many still promote hate against certain people.
That being said, “fuck you, you ignorant evil enabling asshat” sure sounds like you are making assumptions and vilifying someone you’ve never met based on one trait that you do not agree with.
Sorry, bro, but you’ve become the monster you’re trying to fight.
Certain units of the Japanese Army conducted a lot of inhumane scientific experiments on human subjects they racially discriminated against during WWII, and the evidence collected was retained by the USA.
I want to note that none of this was valid science, the results were worthless because they prioritized torture and didn’t document their “experiments” and their results properly. Same for medical Nazi “research”.
Though it’s true that you don’t need religion to do evil acts.
Maybe the Japanese Empire didn’t, but the Nazis were explicitly Christian.
Eh, publicly Christian 100%, but there were plenty of anti-Christian views from Goebbels, and then there’s the Occultism in Nazism as well.
That being said, Positive Christianity was 100% a tool to manipulate the people into doing the State’s will, trying to eject Catholicism from Germany.
Not really. They were certainly white supremacists and hated Jews, but Christianity didn’t really play a big role in their ideology. They spent a lot more time supressing local churches than going on about how christian they are, and many of them were very interested in pagan religions.
This is revisionist bullshit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Nazi_Germany
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_Nazi_Germany#Accommodation_to_Nazism
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-role-of-clergy-and-church-leaders
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-german-churches-and-the-nazi-state
the us thought they were getting a deal from the japanese when they conducting biological experiments on chinese people, but they were getting all fluff results
evidence based science conducted the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Let’s infect black people with syphilis and see what happens! They aren’t really people, so are like monkeys so if they die from untreated diseases it’s not a big deal!
scientific practice both past and present is often rife with racism.
but don’t let the facts of the world get in the way of your worship of science as a religion.
Guaranteed that was run by Christian White Racists
Arguing for faith is literally saying “I will believe anything on no evidence, and I think the following…”
Sorry, I stopped listening when you told me you don’t know how to think as an adult
right, anyone who says anything that disproves you is wrong and bad.
clearly throwing tantrums and calling people names is a thing only very mature adults too. toddlers don’t do that… ever