Religion/spirituality

[fishsupreme]

Our next writing prompt: Talk to me about religion/spirituality.I'm an atheist. I was raised as a mainline Protestant Christian (United Methodist, specifically), and I believed up until my mid-teens, at which point I considered myself agnostic until about 19 years old. Though religion did contribute a lot of guilt to me, and I found church pretty

Comments

[prester_scott]

I recognize that you are not saying this -- though one could infer it from what you are saying -- but I'd like to point out that not everyone who holds religious beliefs does so for emotional reasons, and especially not because they are comforting.

Life after death is not necessarily a comfort when the very first thing you face there is some sort of divine judgment, which is a teaching of most religions. Even heaven is not necessarily a comfort if the process of being made fit for it means giving up every ounce of self-will and personal sovereignty. Nor is following the path of religion in this world necessarily easy and comfortable. I think there are as many people who reject religion, as accept it, for emotional reasons -- especially nowadays, when rejecting religion carries little if any social cost.

Read some mystics if you don't understand mysticism. Generally it is not a mere fever pitch of emotion. It is giving oneself over to direct experience of the divine or supernatural. Generally it is something that happens to the mystic without them seeking it. If you were to approach it from a naturalist, empiricist point of view, you would dismiss the experiences of the mystics not as enthusiastic fervor, but as hallucinations -- although much more coherent, noble, and sometimes prescient, than you would expect from imagination or psychosis.

[fishsupreme]

Oh, I don't think that everyone holds religious beliefs for emotional reasons. However, atheists are frequently asked why we are "angry at God" or "rejecting God," when I'm no more angry at God than I am at Santa Claus. Likewise, I've had people try to convince me to accept their religion based on how great believing in it is, or how happy it makes them, while for me these things are beside the point -- whether or not it would make me feel good has nothing to do with whether or not it's true, and since I'm unable to believe something merely because I want to, convincing me that it would make me happy to believe isn't very useful.

The trouble with mystical experiences is that they're non-transferable; I understand why they convince the mystics themselves, and I can't even rule out the idea that I myself would be convinced were I to have one, but being told of someone else's isn't very convincing, especially not when I know the many ways our brains & senses can fool us. At the same time, I don't think they're generally trying to convert anyone with their accounts anyway, but simply to share what they have experienced.