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

[evelynne]

Emotions can tell you about yourself, but they can't tell you anything about the world.

Wooooow. I have been stuck on this sentence, pondering it, ever since I read it earlier today. Emotions can be so powerful, they SEEM like they ought to be telling us something about the world, but they're not. And I get frustrated by people who don't understand that.

I think that if people feel that there is a God, then I'm fine with them extrapolating that however it pertains to them personally. I like the idea of feeling that someone's looking after me, guiding me, wanting what's best for me. It's only when people try to tell other people what to do based on that feeling that it starts to not work for me.

[fishsupreme]

I think people assume that because emotions are (rightfully) important to us that it implies they have some cosmic importance or uniqueness

[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

[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

[gunslnger]

I think your definition of "supernatural" is a little flawed, mainly because you're using the wrong definition of "natural". Nature is assumed to be mechanical and lawful, meaning that there are "laws of nature" that can be assumed to be consistent and always in force, not just whatever we understand about the universe. Supernatural would be anything that contradicts/violates (or appears to) those laws. So while some things would move from supernatural to natural if we figured how they operated, if they operated in a logical, mechanical, and consistent manner, others would not. For example, God would always be supernatural as He would always be outside the universe (required in order to create it) and not bound by the laws of the universe.