Atheists, is there anything religious that sticks with you to this day?

I am Ganesh, an Indian atheist and I don’t eat beef. It’s not like that I have a religious reason to do that, but after all those years seeing cows as peaceful animals and playing and growing up with them in a village, I doubt if I ever will be able to eat beef. I wasn’t raised very religious, I didn’t go to temple everyday and read Gita every evening unlike most muslims who are somewhat serious about their religion, my family has this watered down religion (which has it’s advantages).

But yeah, not eating beef is a moral issue I deal with. I mean, I don’t care that I don’t eat beef, but the fact that I eat pork and chicken but not beef seems to me to be weird. So, is there any religious practice that you guys follow to this day?

edit: I like religious music, religious temples (Churches, Gurudwara’s, Temples & Mosques in Iran), religious paintings and art sometimes. I know for a fact that the only art you could produce is those days was indeed religious and the greatest artists needed to make something religious to be funded, that we will never know what those artists would have produced in the absence of religion, but yeah, religious art is good nonetheless.

5714,

Sometimes I listen to Gregorian chants.

About cows - there was a YTer who sucessfully connected atheism to veganism (but then didn’t). I think veganism and atheism have a lot in common structurally.

doom_and_gloom,

Agreed - they both tend to involve a non-dualist but still practically materialist framework for their ethics. They look at the environment as it is, weight priorities based on observations, and heuristically minimize purely rhetorical evidence regardless of how much they may or may not dive into philosophy.

5714,

Would you mind translating that into laypeople’s language?

doom_and_gloom, (edited )

Sorry… atheism is somewhat non-dualist because it doesn’t typically deal with non-observable phenomena (it is physicalist in that sense), and it lends itself to materialist (the current state of things as they appear to matter to cause-and-effect) viewpoints. Veganism is non-dualist because it does not elevate the human or the human consciousness, it sees consciousness in a more materialist sense than many religious thinkers - vegans see no reason to differentiate conscious experiences among species, because we humans observe other species reacting to phenomena just as we consciously would. It would take an additional variable, one that has not been observed, to indicate that there is any material difference between experiences among conscious species. Both tend to operate on the assumption that consciousness is emergent and that conscious individuals are not truly separate from each other and their environments.

You may see atheists and vegans dive into philosophy, but atheists and vegans give little weight to arguments that aren’t linked to observable phenomena - as opposed to religious individuals who view things with a lens of faith. So rhetoric doesn’t really have much bearing on their worldview. Instead they have a tendency to fundamentally view the world around them as series of cause-and-effect that can be observed and quantified.

edit: fixed some typos now that i’m less rushed

GarbageShoot,

I’m an anti-theist and I still enjoy a lot of religious literature like Pilgrim’s Progress

WetBeardHairs,

I have had some seriously bizarre cases of deja vu. Like, recalling dreams I had years before that exactly predicted a place I would be in in the future. It has happened five or six times. It does make me question things such as consciousness and my place in the universe. It also makes me wonder if my brain is broken.

doom_and_gloom,

I have this too - I assume it’s a brain quirk.

That or time is an illusion. One or the other.

WetBeardHairs,

Yeah, I think there are mundane answers to this. But “mundane” in this case could include cosmological factors like the universe is a weird temporal foam of timeywimey stuff.

cjsolx,

I’ve heard two theories for this that I think are plausible:

  • A feeling of familiarity even though this is a brand new situation. Your brain is always trying to determine the best course of action from experiences where you’ve encountered that problem before. Sometimes we have a false positive where the situation is so similar you “remember it”, but it’s obviously slightly different and new.
  • Essentially a memory read/write error. Your brain is recollecting as it’s consolidating the memory causing wonkiness (technical term) in your experience. You think you remember, but what you’re remembering is actually the present experience.
doom_and_gloom,

I think deja vu is believed to be due to the second bullet point.

It’s just that sometimes - maybe once in a dozen - it is subjectively very weird, and you just have to leave that little “ya but what if” in the corner of your mind with the other unlikely cosmological possibilities.

barsoap,

You think you remember, but what you’re remembering is actually the present experience.

Or you do remember, it’s just very very very recent. The present moment is rather funky when it comes to perception (it’s not an instant but more of a sliding window in time) and it’s reasonable that things can feel like remembering precisely when you see something because whatever lag there is in “write to memory, read from memory” still fits into that sliding window.

Big_Bob,
@Big_Bob@hexbear.net avatar

I call myself an atheist simply because I don’t believe that any current religious institution has the correct answer.

I’ve had mystical experiences and my own reasoning tells me that there is far more to the world than we are able to experience or even imagine.

But none of it corresponds to any religions I know of. The closest is maybe Buddhism, but I don’t think it’s the right choice for me.

And I’m not even sure if there are any Buddhist organisations out here in the norwegian countryside.

Guess I’ll just have to go through my existential crisis on my own. shrug-outta-hecks

lud,

I call myself an atheist simply because I don’t believe that any current religious institution has the correct answer.

That’s not really atheist since thats denying any gods or similar phenomenon and it sound more line agnosticism or even theism

Chriskmee, (edited )

Most Atheists define Atheism as “lack of belief in a God”, which seems like it applies here. Agnostic is usually defined as “lack of knowledge of a God”, which also works here, so both Agnostic and Atheist.

It makes sense when you look at Theist (with belief in a God) and Gnostic (with knowledge of a God) that adding an A before it just means “without”.

mojo,

I really like churches, they are a good way to find a strong community. It can be really hard as an adult in a new area to meet people, and a church can basically solve that for you. I’m in a very religious area too where they desperately want me to go to one.

Also I’ve kind of understood “praying” now. I meditate a lot, and the goal to focus on your inner breath and be one with the present moment. Praying is kind of the opposite, instead of focusing on your inner self, you’re focusing on something greater outside of you, like trying to connect your body to the universe. It’s like trying to imagine you’re part of something greater and it’s kind of comforting.

Ocelot,

100%! Cathedrals and Temples especially are some of the most amazing pieces of architecture. You can’t walk in to a historic European cathedral with the ceiling reaching to the sky and stained glass windows and not feel something.

barsoap,

Both are meditation, vipassanā vs. jhāna, though that encompasses a flurry of potential objects/concepts/qualia of focus.

you’re focusing on something greater outside of you, like trying to connect your body to the universe. It’s like trying to imagine you’re part of something greater and it’s kind of comforting.

That sounds roughly like the fifth jhāna, infinite space. I just can’t resist to comment here that our intelligence, mammal intelligence in general, is largely based on repurposed/expanded spatial awareness circuitry. That we use terms like “mind map” is anything but coincidental.

c0mbatbag3l,
@c0mbatbag3l@lemmy.world avatar

Is that why we are able to visualize? Or at least most of us?

barsoap,

Kinda… yes and no? Visualisations aren’t necessarily spatial, as in representing a map of a space. Random example I get a different erm quality for the qualia for “fish tank” and “interaction of fishes in a tank”, only the latter has that space-like quality the other is a mere image representation of an idea. It cannot have, as a singular object there’s nothing to set it in relation to.

But back to practice: Close your eyes, and consider where you are. You’re probably still “seeing” the room around you in your mind’s eye, and could navigate to, say, the door reasonably accurately (and the inaccuracy is due to lack of practice, blind folks excel at that kind of stuff). Navigation through terrain you’re not directly seeing (whether that be because of closed eyes or a forest obscuring it) is the original function of the circuitry and other uses of it have a similar quality to it.

What is almost certain is that that circuitry is the reason why we have a very hard time visualising anything higher-dimensional than 3d space: It’s just not in its feature set because little warm-blooded critters living alongside dinosaurs had no use for it.

SecretPancake,

Still love me some good Gospel music.

M68040,
@M68040@hexbear.net avatar

Some of the philosophy has stuck with me and I take a keen interest in the social and anthropological aspects of religion, but I’ve had such a consistently bad experience with American Christianity (particularly online) that I just can’t really trust anyone enough to even think about partaking in any of them anymore.

I’d rather just improvise anyhow.

TheAnonymouseJoker,
@TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml avatar

Indian here. Souls exist. And I do not have pork or beef because they have unhealthy fats.

Subject6051,

I was just about to take to seriously and then I read your username :'(

TheAnonymouseJoker,
@TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml avatar

And may I ask why is the name a problem? Joke or political leaning?

Subject6051,

nah buddy, it was a joke. btw, Idk about unhealthy fats, it contains some well needed stuff to you know?

TheAnonymouseJoker,
@TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml avatar

Like? I get everything from mutton, chicken, eggs and fish.

Subject6051,

I am sorry, I though you don’t eat meat. I am sorry, I misread it. my fault. But yeah, you are doing good. I am pretty sure you are missing nothing. Fish especially is very good apprently

TheAnonymouseJoker,
@TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml avatar

I also have a lot of dairy, and supplement B complex to keep the body reserves full. In addition, I sunbathe once every week for Vitamin D. My nutrition and fitness game is strong.

Colour_me_triggered,

Was raised atheist.

neptune,

This is probably slightly tangential, but after leaving a very dogmatic, Christian upbringing, I dabbled in the New Atheist Thing but have since come to realize religion and belief is on a two dimensional axes.

On the first axis, you have dogma, or a core set of beliefs or religious doctrine. High or low dogma. Your classic fundamentalists of any stripe are over here. Evangelical Christians, fundamentalist Islam. And yes even some strains of atheism can be relatively high dogma. On the lower end of the dogma scale you have agnostics, many atheists, some types of new age spirituality, and even some types of organized religion like Unitarianism or Buddhism.

On the second axis is humanism, or the relishing and participation in people, culture and acceptance of people or ideas that do not conform to the doctrine. High on the humanism scale would be literal secular humanists, and other faiths that prioritize people more than dogma.

Eventually, someone raised in a high dogma/low humanism religion might eventually learn there are some faiths that are relatively high humanism, even with a low or relatively high dogma score.

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.

ThatHermanoGuy,

It sounds like you don’t understand what atheist or agnostic actually mean.

neptune,

Yes an atheist believes there is basically no evidence there is a God while an agnostic believes it’s an unknowable or unanswerable questions.

The issue is if an atheist adheres to some dogma (eg all religious people are bad and dogmatic, people who don’t read the same books are ignorant) then it becomes a relatively high dogmatic belief system, for that person.

airportline,
@airportline@lemmy.ml avatar

I recognize that Churches are often community centers and do a lot of good work

Iraglassceiling,
@Iraglassceiling@hexbear.net avatar

What an interesting question!

I was raised Protestant by an exmo and a lapsed catholic. I still like some of the music, and I think a lot of Christian mythology is really interesting. Jesus occupies a “cool dude” role in my belief system, but he’s not the main focus.

I was a pretty devout practicing pagan for a while after leaving Christianity.

Now I just kinda do my own thing, loosely cribbed from the parts of Christianity that I like and some chaos magic stuff and some kemeticism and whatever else seems cool. I kinda focus on nonduality and go from there.

I really enjoy the idea of ritualistic worship, but that attraction feels like the kind of chemical attraction in my brain that would have taken place whether I was raised in a church or not.

some_guy,

Not a goddamn thing. If I needed religion to tell me how to live, I’d be completely amoral and depraved. I simply treat others as I wish to be treated and live life trying not to negatively impact anyone else.

h3doublehockeysticks,

deleted_by_author

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  • Subject6051,

    Jew/ish or a Muslim? I don’t do alcohol either (because it’s bad, not because I have a moral problem with that)

    ThisIsAManWhoKnowsHowToGling,

    I was a Satanist for a bit. I still use Magick to think about leadership and social manipulation. Its pretty useful for me, and it’s also funny as hell to think of a boardroom meeting as a ritual circle around an altar of PowerPoint.

    barsoap,

    The High Priests of the Egregore! The High Priests of the Egregore!

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