> I recommend religion and religious teachings which address this and many other daily worldly issues perfectly.
This advice simply doesn't work if the recipient is an atheist.
To me, Religious texts are made up fiction that hold no more meaning in my world view than Harry Potter or Game of Thrones. If you read enough fiction on a shared topic, you'll be able to pull the same number of 'enlightening' quotes from those books as religious people can from their own sacred tomes.
However, IF you are a religious person, and find meaning in your religious books, then take the win, and enjoy that path. It's just that it's not a path everyone can take.
I mean, I used to be an atheist. Like, going to Richard Dawkins on campus, sneering at how stupid Christians were rolling my eyes at every little thing atheist. For a good ten to fifteen years. Then I realized it was terrible for my mental health and just got over myself and adopted more of a Pascal’s Wager outlook. Like, I frankly don’t give a damn about the truth or falsity of religion anymore. That’s not the point. It lets me act as if my life has meaning regardless of whether or not that’s true, which even when I directly reflect on it is a small amount of comfort insulating me from the yawning abyss of existential terror I felt throughout all of my 20s and half of my teens.
If pressed I guess I’ll say it’s unlikely to be true. But that’s not the point. I don’t even care to explain the point really. But both me and my wife ran Meetup groups about being atheist and eventually decided reading Christian philosophy and teachings was a better bet than the slow crushing millstone of the weight of the universe awaiting me behind the curtain of materialism.
There’s a lot of really bad stuff and I think Christianity needs reforming, but I still think it’s the better long term bet in terms of the wellbeing of me and my future generations.
> Like, going to Richard Dawkins on campus, sneering at how stupid Christians were rolling my eyes at every little thing atheist. For a good ten to fifteen years. Then I realized it was terrible for my mental health and just got over myself and adopted more of a Pascal’s Wager outlook.
As an atheist, you weren't a practicing atheist. You were an agitator with a religion of your own, which is projecting and spreading atheism. I used to call these folks "militant atheists" because, like when I was a teenager and left the Catholic church, I was ready to treat others the way I'd been treated (and seen others treated). This is not a healthy paradigm for leaving any community though and furthermore it repeats the sins of the past.
> Like, I frankly don’t give a damn about the truth or falsity of religion anymore. That’s not the point. It lets me act as if my life has meaning regardless of whether or not that’s true, which even when I directly reflect on it is a small amount of comfort insulating me from the yawning abyss of existential terror I felt throughout all of my 20s and half of my teens.
... and then you adopted the mindset of an actual atheist (one without religion), and then adopted a religion!
For what it's worth, I'm glad you're happy, that's really what matters. Maybe now that you have experience as someone without religion it gives you perspective as someone with faith. From what you've written, it sounds like that's the case.
A final thought (and opinion) that no one asked for: as an atheist I applaud the healthy exercise of and engagement with religion. The only time in which I object to religions or institutions is when they think their ideas are proper enough to be codified into law. For that, we have science and bureaucracy, of which religion can be a part of neither due to self-interested hegemony, which is an obvious conflict of interest.
I know the universe is a cold void but I find tons of meaning in seeing my family and friends be happy. From my relative perception of what's good and what matters, that's sufficient. Perpetuating mass delusion through religion doesn't seem like the better bet.
Replace the word "religion" by "communal life philosophy" and perhaps you'll start understanding its actual value.
I've been reading Stoic philosophers for some time now and it has helped me a lot. Christianity seems to take a lot from them and adds a mythical spin.
I think the biggest issue with religion stems from the fact that many people fail to understand religious texts are not factual they are metaphorical. Unfortunately, throughout history (and still today) this misunderstanding has been used and led to an incalculable number of heinous crimes.
It seems like you've really loaded up the term "atheist" here with a lot of negative connotation. It's unfortunate, but a lot of people seem to think this way. Truth is, everyone in the world is an atheist if you just take the word at its basic definition of "a lack of belief in a god or god(s)". That is, there are surely gods you've never even heard of and so you lack belief in them. The way you feel about those unknown gods is the same way I feel about all gods
But the label of atheist has been imbued with all sorts of negativity. So much so that some people hear it and think being an atheist actually makes someone evil, without any care for the well-being of other humans. Or they think the atheist must be miserable and unfeeling.
It's why I don't even use the term any more. I don't know if other people I'm talking to will have the same definition of the term that I do. If someone asks me about my religious beliefs, I simply say that I have none.
I mean, did you live through the new Atheism and then the Atheism+ movement of the 2000s and 2010s? I watched peoples lives get ruined, mentally unwell people commit suicide, people get arrested for embezzling donations, the works.
The “atheist community” (and it was oddly enough a real thing for awhile, with atheist church and everything! Look up Oasis on YouTube). It attracted people who were hedonistic and amoral and, in retrospect, went down in flames about how you’d have expected.
I’m not just some isolated Christian who has never met an atheist deriding them as some sort of bogeyman, I was friends with people in Poly Quads and met spouses who were bullied by their SO into being swingers, then watched 50 year olds behave like teenagers with all the consummate drama as well.
Once we had kids we totally removed ourselves from that situation and it fell apart a few years later, after the leader (who was originally a Christian pastor, I might add) got #metoo’ed for (surprise surprise) having sex with half the women in the organization.
> If pressed I guess I’ll say it’s unlikely to be true. But that’s not the point.
The problem is expecting the dogma of a thousands years old tradition and book to be absolutely true. There are things in the Bible and Christianity that are basically tall tales. For example, I doubt Jesus was immaculately conceived, but it makes for a great story. People make up stories about remarkable people. I believe Jesus was a real person who had world-changing insights, but I'm afraid a lot of cruft has built up around him and been carried forward as literal truth.
The challenge for an individual is separating the wheat from the chaff.
Most of my thoughts on the matter are derived from Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God is Within You.
I didn't read it, but I listened to an audiobook version of TKOGIWY about a year ago on a long road trip. I must have missed something, because my take-away was that the author was propounding the merits of of passivism, and anti-authoritarianism. I thought it was tedious. I remember being disappointed.
It is very dense and in a philosophical style. I'm not surprised it was tedious as an audiobook. I'd like to read it again myself. My takeaway was that Tolstoy believed Christ had ushered in a new era for man, philosophically. The previous eras were:
1. man serves self and family
2. man serves state and country
3. man serves god
He believed many of our problems are due to most of us still being stuck at level 2 of existence. A man at level 3 is immune to the problems of a man at level 2. For example, they couldn't even compel Jesus w/ bodily harm. They killed him, and what good did it do them?
He also argued that the shift to level 3 is inevitable and already in progress.
I am also a non-believer, but I think there is room for religion even for those who have a difficult time with the "fairy tale" aspect of it. Personally, I do not, but I'm thinking about giving it a shot.
The thing is that the stories in religious books help paint a picture of life and offer anecdotes on how one can navigate it. There is no need to look for enlightenment, just practical advice on how to deal with tough life situations and help you find motivation and strength to power through. Thousands of years of observing and documenting people's lives through stories and metaphors has value, even for us non-believers.
I think you'd even be surprised how many people who regularly attend church services don't actually believe in the mystic aspect of it all; it's the community and guidance that have the most value to them.
You can pick and choose philosophy and morals from a religion (or multiple religions) without buying the whole farm. To me, this seems like the right way to go. Cherry pick the good stuff and ignore the cruel parts and weird, supernatural stuff.
Church selection seems to play a big role. I don't know too much about it but from other commenters, there are apparently churches that emphasize the mysticism and paranormal side of Christianity, some that focus on the texts, some that mostly deal with hero-worship and the hero's origin story, some that are basically political Trump rallies, and some more laid back ones that are basically social/music clubs.
You really don't see the difference between popular fiction and cultural texts that have survived for thousands of years?
How do you feel about The Iliad, Plato's dialogues, the Mahabharata, Tao Te Ching, or the Epic of Gilgamesh? Do they also offer "no more meaning in your world" than modern fantasy novels?
I didn't think being an atheist meant closing ones mind to human culture. Guess I've been doing it wrong.
I think the person you replied to simply meant they found no spiritual significance in religious texts. That is, their ONLY value is either as a piece of literature or as a historical recording of culture.
Do you have any more evidence for some of the claims made in those texts than you do for the claims made in religious texts? Read them all as fiction, but they're still culturally significant and a lot can be learned by reading them, even if all you are learning is more about your fellow human's perspective.
The Dao De Jing, Mahabharata, and Plato's dialogues have been or are currently used as religious texts (the former two more then the latter, but the Neo-Platonism is/was a hell of a drug).
I disagree - I do not believe in any organized religion but I do like the Bible - almost all of Western society is built on it so there is a power in the words as you're tapping into something fundamental that's been bounced around culture for centuries. I dip into it occasionally and find some passage that really speaks to me.
Admittedly I do ignore parts of it - there's a lot of "wives should be obedient" stuff in there that has not aged well for instance - and I read it as God representing something like the Chinese Dao - IE the impersonal and immaterial laws of nature, the way that things unfold, and faith in God being an active version of the Stoic idea that you can't change the things you don't have control over, so just let it be.
To me, Theology is really philosophy + God. That's kinda the beauty of it, you can interpret it however you like or however it fits you at the time. If you don't want the + God right now, just consider the philosophy.
>Religious texts are made up fiction that hold no more meaning in my world view
Plato's The Cave allegory is relevant, even though no one would ever live in a cave like that and it's obviously fiction. Some people treat the Bible as a historical text, but most don't. Some people believe the earth is flat too, there's always that 10-20%.
Having said that, I tried reading the Bible but I couldn't get through all the begats. I do like hearing honest people discuss it though. Like anything, it can certainly be weaponized.
I think philosophy without faith is nice but doesn't have the same benefits at all. I think what makes religious people happier is the strong sense of community and offloading some of their existential angst to a third party.
I think it can be interesting to approach religious teachings from a perennialist mindset: what’s common between all religions.
There is a lot to learn about life and human nature in religion. You don’t have to believe in an afterlife or practice dogma to get something out of it.
In context, your reply sounds like a negative take, but I find it rather positive.
I've always found good fiction enlightening. There is no need to be so serious about it.
My biggest criticism of religion is the very boundary drawn between fiction and scripture: that adherents to a religion must treat fiction as if it is reality.
All too often, that means obsessing over obedience to a structure of rules/dogma, instead of confronting the reality right in front of us; like voting to restrict gay marriage so God will bless our country, instead of learning to empathize with people around us to become a better community.
> My biggest criticism of religion is the very boundary drawn between fiction and scripture: that adherents to a religion must treat fiction as if it is reality.
Agreed. This is the part that really gets under my skin… its been my understanding for most of my life that the bible specifically is full of allegory, not history. Yet, so many many of the “believers” I encounter don’t know what “allegory” means. The bible is their literal truth!
Tbh, knowing this isn’t helpful. It somehow makes me more paralyzed in dealing with literal believers. It always feels like they know they’re full of shit, but won’t admit it. There’s a disingenuousness to it that very deeply bothers me.
like voting to restrict gay marriage so God will bless our country
Do we know how this is going to play out, though? Has matrimony between same sex couples ever been widely available in any civilization? Rome, Greece, China and Egypt all had various different approaches to open homosexual relationships overtime, but it's hard to find any significant civilization that broadly equated same sex unions and heterosexual marriage. I'll allow that my research on this is incomplete.
I think anyone who thinks they know for certain how this kind of social change will play out on the scale of decades or centuries is mistaken. It's possible that everything turns out great and we enter a golden era of tolerance and flourishing human relationships, but at the same time there's usually something worth fearing in the unknown, which is why we tend to.
If no one has tried it yet, it might be worth being the first one.
From what I can tell, the only group claiming to know what will happen in the future are religious conservatives who want gay marriage outlawed. It's their claim that homosexual unions will lead to a bad societal outcome, and that claim is based purely on religious dogma.
The difference between Harry Potter and most religious texts is that the religious texts are often the result of thousands of years of evolutionary processes which refine them, and the people who have followed them have survived/thrived.
It doesn't matter if the Bible/Koran/whatever is a fact or not. Religious beliefs/texts are an extension of human evolution and should be seen that way. Questioning their wisdom in helping humans thrive is like questioning the value of arms.
Like proscriptions on pork or seafood; we have a pretty good understanding of the consequences of eating pork and don't necessarily have to rely on something that was a useful rule of thumb absent that knowledge.
>> often the result of thousands of years of evolutionary processes which refine them
>> Religious beliefs/texts are an extension of human evolution and should be seen that way.
If this is true, does it mean that churches all over the world did a big disservice to the holy books and stopped the evolution by creating institutions dedicated to preserve text of this books in unchanged form argumenting that those books literally are word of God and thus cannot be changed?
You might be aware of the fact that different factions/sects exist within the major religions, similar to how humans physically evolve separate traits. Some of those off-shoots will be more successful than others.
I'm sure you have some great ideas about living. Let's check the reproductive rate of the people who follow your ideas in a thousand years.
This answer is on the right track. There will always be outliers, but most humans have a fundamental need for “religion”.
The west is in the process of creating a new one (modern liberal values), but as with most rewrites, you probably should have understood the existing solution before throwing it out.
A friend of mine stated this as such: "every human able to reason has a religion-shaped hole in them; and that spot will be filled with something whether or not the human expects it to or wants it to."
I submit that plenty of religious thought patterns (things and systems you are not allowed to question the wisdom of, obsequious deference to authority, etc.) exist outside the halls of churches. PG's essay on heresy comes to mind.
IMO, one benefit of religion that is difficult to capture anywhere else is that it creates a mutually supportive community. I personally can't get over sacrificing my own intellectual honesty for the sake in group acceptance, but in most cases, I do think this is a trade off worth making. Secular Jews seem to be able to have it both ways, though I'm not sure this is something easily replicable.
> This advice simply doesn't work if the recipient is an atheist.
Then try Buddhism? More of a philosophy than a religion, and seems to have hit on the idea thousands of years ago that most problems in humanity are to do with mental illness of one sort or another.
Buddhism is definitely a religion with a specific epistemology, claims on the supernatural (karma, cycle of samsara), manifestations of the divine (Bodhisattva), rituals, chants and prayers. Some Buddhist sects can be pretty radical, even.
Buddhism as conceptualized in the western world is a marketing strategy that appeals to people thanks to the fact the Buddhism is exotic, the same reason Christian symbolism is à la mode in Asia (just see how many anime have Christian themes). If you could repackage Christianity to convince these people that it is new, exotic and exciting they would convert immediately.
By the way, there are philosophical traditions, both in Buddhism and Christianity, that reject any supernatural claim and see religion as a useful but not true moral framework, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_atheism
P.S.: I'm an atheist. I'm not defending a religion or another.
> f you read enough fiction on a shared topic, you'll be able to pull the same number of 'enlightening' quotes from those books as religious people can from their own sacred tomes.
In fact, Harry Potter And The Sacred Text does exactly that!
I’ve known plenty of people who get a ton of meaning out of fictional works too. Just because you view it as fictional doesn’t mean it can’t have meaning.
I hold spirituality to be a choice to hold things sacred. Almost everyone holds something sacred, whether it's family bonds or whatever. You can also choose to hold more things sacred, even the entire world, without believing in divinities.
> Religious texts are made up fiction that hold no more meaning in my world view than Harry Potter or Game of Thrones
I have been downvoted many times (not sure why?) for stating this on HN, but I will state it again:
It's sad that this line of thinking has taken over the modern time. We now have "science", so we don't need any of that silly stuff like "philosophy" or "art" or "religion". All can be explained through the scientific method and all other branches of human intellect are null and avoid.
Of course, this comes from the new Atheists who influenced a lot of the younger generation years a go when they started but their ideas actually stems from older philosophers who shaped the modern day thinking.
Mainly Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche (who was also influenced by Feuerbach), Jean Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault.
For example, What did Jean-Paul Sartre say? "Existence precedes essence" and you can _clearly_ see how this has affected the modern Atheism mentality in the 21st century.
If existence precedes essence, then everything is relative and nothing can be objective and absolute; thus to claim things such as objective morality in the way that religion does is meaningless.
Don't forget that Sartre said: "If God exists, I can't be free, but I am free. Therefore God does not exist". Once again, if you look carefully enough, you absolutely see this in the modern world. The New Atheists for example, took all their ideas and spread them from these philosophers. What was Hitchen's famous quote? He would constantly regurgitate Karl Marx: "Religion is the opium of the people" which again.. is rooted from Sartre philosophy.
More to it, to anyone who claims religious people are intellectual inept, I would simply challenge you to read any of the material written by the intellectuals of the tradition. For example, for Christianity they would be: Augustine of Hippo, Anselm of Canterbury, Thomas Aquinas or John Henry Newman and tell me you're dealing with someone who has suspended his critical faculties.
You are welcome to disagree with them of course, but to claim that we should simply replace these materials with math books is disingenuous.
>> More to it, to anyone who claims religious people are intellectual inept, I would simply challenge you to read any of the material written by the intellectuals of the tradition
That's a straw man - we all are idiots sometimes (I believe that most of times but that just me) and this little silly observation can be easily used to explain how otherwise rational and intelligent person can hold two opposite views in their had. Our rational abilities are greatly exaggerated by people like You who believe that there are magical others that can be rational all the time in all aspects of their life.
Those people believe in God because they want to believe (by which I mean its an emotional decision and not an logical one) and the logic is there only to rationalize what their emotions are telling them.
I suspect that if medicine will get advanced enough we will see finally that by just playing with memory and emotional state of person we can easily turn the most avid believer into Christopher Hitchens (and vice versa).
Religion would be ok to me and, I’d imagine, OP if it presented itself as philosophy or fairy tales that you could take or leave. Or a part of human history like medieval knights.
It’s a curios byproduct of human inquisitiveness and that’s it. it shouldn’t have any special rights or claims to have a deeper understanding of the universe that would even give certain people (priests etc) to be the judges of other people’s actions.
The world wouldn’t succumb into chaos if all churches / mosques etc . were gone in an instant and people forgot they existed as anything but pretty buildings.
There were of course smart and kind people at all times and they happened to use the vehicles of religion some long long time ago when it seemed like the best logic toolbox for the mind
This advice simply doesn't work if the recipient is an atheist.
To me, Religious texts are made up fiction that hold no more meaning in my world view than Harry Potter or Game of Thrones. If you read enough fiction on a shared topic, you'll be able to pull the same number of 'enlightening' quotes from those books as religious people can from their own sacred tomes.
However, IF you are a religious person, and find meaning in your religious books, then take the win, and enjoy that path. It's just that it's not a path everyone can take.