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jackWhere do I stand religiously? Still atheist, about like you'd probably expect. Although more thoughts in a follow-up post.
Is there any particular religion I'm not? I think that's a question which is interesting in potentially several different ways.
I generally expect a religion to be something like "some combination of a culture, a belief system about the supernatural, and a moral framework".
Culture-wise, I'm very much english and vaguely CoE. I do Christmas, and Easter, and other english religious-instigated festivals, and I'd happily do other ones instead if I lived in a culture where that was normal, but it would feel very strange not to do ANYTHING for Xmas. I went to CoE things with school sometimes, and learned hymns and so on, and I hadn't realised how much I'd subconsciously absorbed how I expected religious services to work until I actively compared notes with people who had absorbed _different_ expectations: not just the obvious things, as the things I didn't even think to question (of course you bury people in the churchyard, right?)
And I'm also sopping up a steady trickle of Jewish culture from Rachel and Rachel's friends, and I really value having the experience of another culture, although I doubt I'd get to the point where it would displace my background as my primary religious-derived culture (unless I specifically made an effort to do so).
So in one sense, you might say my atheism is "CoE with the God taken out", although that's not really fair to CoE, nor to people who don't believe in God but come from different cultural traditions.
The other way of posing the question is, what, specifically, don't I believe? Well, basically, "anything supernatural" (where supernatural means something roughly like "outside how we expect physics to work",but you probably know what I mean better than I can describe). Which was always presented to me as a defining feature of religion. With emphasis on "and therefore you should obey this set of rules even if they seem horrible". That's what I'm atheist against, that's what I'm not. Although, my terminology may not be right, because that's the background I'm coming from, but I encounter more religious people for whom that is a small or non-existent part of their religion.
Is there any particular religion I'm not? I think that's a question which is interesting in potentially several different ways.
I generally expect a religion to be something like "some combination of a culture, a belief system about the supernatural, and a moral framework".
Culture-wise, I'm very much english and vaguely CoE. I do Christmas, and Easter, and other english religious-instigated festivals, and I'd happily do other ones instead if I lived in a culture where that was normal, but it would feel very strange not to do ANYTHING for Xmas. I went to CoE things with school sometimes, and learned hymns and so on, and I hadn't realised how much I'd subconsciously absorbed how I expected religious services to work until I actively compared notes with people who had absorbed _different_ expectations: not just the obvious things, as the things I didn't even think to question (of course you bury people in the churchyard, right?)
And I'm also sopping up a steady trickle of Jewish culture from Rachel and Rachel's friends, and I really value having the experience of another culture, although I doubt I'd get to the point where it would displace my background as my primary religious-derived culture (unless I specifically made an effort to do so).
So in one sense, you might say my atheism is "CoE with the God taken out", although that's not really fair to CoE, nor to people who don't believe in God but come from different cultural traditions.
The other way of posing the question is, what, specifically, don't I believe? Well, basically, "anything supernatural" (where supernatural means something roughly like "outside how we expect physics to work",but you probably know what I mean better than I can describe). Which was always presented to me as a defining feature of religion. With emphasis on "and therefore you should obey this set of rules even if they seem horrible". That's what I'm atheist against, that's what I'm not. Although, my terminology may not be right, because that's the background I'm coming from, but I encounter more religious people for whom that is a small or non-existent part of their religion.
Re: Buddhism
Date: 2014-12-12 12:07 pm (UTC)However, some conceptions of buddhism believe in a literal reincarnation. I don't believe in that, just as much as I don't believe in a creator-god. Or a pantheon. Or nature spirits. Or ghosts. Or anything else supernatural. It just so happens that creator-god is by far the most prominent belief in the supernatural in my society, so my a-theism is more evident than my a-reincarnation, my a-ghosts, etc, etc.
And Buddhism isn't the sole purview of upstanding philosophy. In areas where buddhism is the default culture, people are good and bad like people everywhere. If you google for genocide by buddhists, you get current news reports, not nothing.
So I'm not sure how much "buddhism as religion compatible with atheism" is actually a fair idea, and how much it's been re-invented by western atheists and enlightenment seekers, and I'm wary of taking and interpreting someone's culture without really understanding it.
Like, it's definitely a possible approach, but I would basically be learning about buddhism from scratch, with no reason to think I actually agreed when I found out more about it...
Re: Buddhism
Date: 2014-12-12 07:26 pm (UTC)To pick one example, in Africa the emphasis is far more on spiritualistic practices, and people are much more afraid of demonic possession, a phenomenon scarcely given credence in the Europe and North America. To pick another, infant mortality in the UK was 14% in 1900 and below 0.5% now, which puts a very different complexion on conversations about whether to baptise people at birth or wait until they're old enough to make up their own minds.
It's all still Christianity, though. Similarly, by my understanding Oriental Buddhists don't regard Western forms as somehow invalid.
Though, as I noted to
Re: Buddhism
Date: 2014-12-12 08:34 pm (UTC)Since you bring it up, I've not studied Christian variations specifically, but I've some idea of how cultural beliefs can vary (even across Europe) -- but it's something that makes it hard for me to take anything talking about "Christian theology" seriously, when it seems like the things people would like to think are the "official answers" vary widely...?
merely to understand better why you're not interested.
I do think that's a relevant question. But it's not, there's something specific preventing me, it's "are the reasons to investigate further sufficiently pressing", and so far, I've heard generally positive things, that it's the sort of thing I might get a lot of benefit from, but so are a lot of other things I'd like to investigate one day, I don't have a clear idea that this one is more so than all the others. I get the feeling you're assuming that if I don't have a religion, I'm missing something, but I'm not sure that's true.