I'm not religious, and not seeking to adopt new beliefs about the divine anytime soon... but there's something very comforting about reading Proverbs
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Well, yeah, there is a lot of highly Christian-specific stuff that I mostly ignore... but not totally... I'm not sure? It makes sense within the system, and I can sort of get its emotional impact by simulating within my brain a believer in that system, but I don't accept the system... or something?
There is far, far more to religion than just "belief in God," and it is very, very possible to get so much out of it even if you don't accept that. Thousands of years of the world's brightest minds (that's all they cared about for most of history) have been devoted to studying religion, and they came up with far more than "there is a God and you should believe."
This is one of the things that gets me furious about the "religion is fundamentally awful" philosophy. Their logic generally goes something like "fundamentalists are religious; fundamentalists are bad; therefore religion is bad." Or maybe something like "There is no logical proof for God; my dictionary says that holding a belief for which there is no logical proof is a sign of delusion; therefore people who believe in God are delusional and should be accorded the same status as other people fitting the connotation of the word as well as the denotation
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It's OK. I feel like an awful lot of people really need to hear that rant. I read "fuck creationism" blogs a lot less frequently than I used to because I'm sick of them being dismissive-at-best, among other reasons.
What I'm confused about is that I understand there is far, far more to religion than just belief in $god, and I'm trying to narrow down precisely what of that "far, far more" I'm trying to find.
Well, with this train of thought, there isn't really "religion" in general. I mean, there are different faiths and religions, but I don't know anybody who believes in something called "religion."
So I guess what I'm saying is, that "far, far more" is going to radically change from tradition to tradition.
There's a whole lot to look through. If you want to, you could spend your whole life looking through it, no matter what you're looking for.
And I guess where you should start looking really depends on what you're looking for. Unless that's backwards, and the right thing to do is to start looking and figure out what you were seeking once you find it.
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There is far, far more to religion than just "belief in God," and it is very, very possible to get so much out of it even if you don't accept that. Thousands of years of the world's brightest minds (that's all they cared about for most of history) have been devoted to studying religion, and they came up with far more than "there is a God and you should believe."
This is one of the things that gets me furious about the "religion is fundamentally awful" philosophy. Their logic generally goes something like "fundamentalists are religious; fundamentalists are bad; therefore religion is bad." Or maybe something like "There is no logical proof for God; my dictionary says that holding a belief for which there is no logical proof is a sign of delusion; therefore people who believe in God are delusional and should be accorded the same status as other people fitting the connotation of the word as well as the denotation ( ... )
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What I'm confused about is that I understand there is far, far more to religion than just belief in $god, and I'm trying to narrow down precisely what of that "far, far more" I'm trying to find.
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So I guess what I'm saying is, that "far, far more" is going to radically change from tradition to tradition.
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And I guess where you should start looking really depends on what you're looking for. Unless that's backwards, and the right thing to do is to start looking and figure out what you were seeking once you find it.
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