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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: God and morality
Date: 2014-12-12 07:45 pm (UTC)Congratulations — your first paragraph is articulating things that, before I was Christian, I felt as a gnawing worry deep inside without being able to articulate or acknowledge.
So I'm not sure most people do have things like that all the time. At any rate, not to that extent, not consciously like you do. My own experience is that for many years I was relatively contented with my life, not aware of anything obviously awry, then went through a couple of years of searching and disquiet. Now, I acknowledge and embarace doubts like you describe, without being scared of them. (Well, not much, and not often.)
I needed God's grace to see those deep flaws in myself. But at the same time God's love and forgiveness support me through that process. I'm very grateful it happened, is happening, like that for me; I can see how it would have been scary to see them without!
Re: God and morality
Date: 2014-12-12 08:20 pm (UTC)I'm not sure most people do have things like that all the time.
I didn't necessarily mean they were conscious of them, but that most people have things they intend to do one day, but never get round to, often because there's something they're scared of but don't realise.
Like, from my point of view, recognising those sorts of things and facing and putting to rest those fears is a worthwhile sort of (non-supernatual) spiritual growth people come to in various ways: by introspection, by therapy, by pep talks from their parents, by mentoring from a religious or cultural leader, by self-help books, by a sense of God. I'm aware you would disagree -- presumably you would say that God is uniquely qualified to help us and the other things that help are imperfect reflections of that?
But I'm worried you don't realise how people can have different problems to you, that you assume most people have the same problems you had, but just need help to realise it, and that only the same path that helped you can help them. And I'm not sure that's true...
Re: God and morality
Date: 2014-12-12 09:37 pm (UTC)Nope — I'd say God is uniquely qualified to help us and the other things are manifestations of His grace and love, whether people acknowledge that or not.
I mean, you talk of "(non-supernatual) spiritual growth", but I'm not clear what that means. For non-supernatural spiritual growth, don't you have to have a non-supernatural spirit? What's one of those? To put it another way, can one of Google's data centres exhibit spiritual growth?
Maybe a useful approximation is that God is to spirit as Universe is to brain. We ought to be grateful that by His grace we are blessed with spiritual growth, but then again we ought to be grateful we were created at all, so…
I know full well that in some cases I have different problems from other people, whereas in other cases I have the same problems but don't acknowledge this. It's often really difficult to tell those cases apart.
I don't (well, try not to) assume other people have the same problems as me. But I do assume everyone has that difficulty.
Re: God and morality
Date: 2014-12-12 11:42 pm (UTC)Maybe spiritual growth isn't the right word. I'm not even sure "supernatural" is. I think, there's nothing supernatural, no soul, no spirit, that exists in any way other than "the way neurons and hormones and physical brain bits are connected together". But that knowing the brain obeys the laws of physics doesn't tell you everything you need to know about it, the implications of the way it's connected are really complicated even though ultimately deterministic (or conceivably random, if you admit quantum).
So by "spiritual growth" I meant the sort of thing I describe above of realising where I was being held back from things by being scared; of general moral health and self-awareness. But purely as a "improve the mind in conscious and subconscious ways", not as "spirit" as a separate supernatural substance. I'm not sure if that's more or less similar to the ways people would describe it if they believe in a soul additional to a mind...
I don't (well, try not to) assume other people have the same problems as me. But I do assume everyone has that difficulty.
OK, then we may be on the same page after all. Several times it seemed you were trying to talk round to a mistake you were scared I was making, which is always possible, but I didn't think I was! :) But maybe you actually weren't doing that deliberately.