I see your thinky thoughts, and raise you a thoughty think.

[trickykitty]

damia put up a post asking, "What does a person's religion say about them? About their culture? About their views of life? What do they fear? ... If we have made god in our own image, as Spinoza suggests, what does this say about us? Are we proud of what we've made?"


I wonder how that fits for me. I've started taking to labeling myself as secular, rather than try to argue, fuss, and fight over whether or not I'm atheist or agnostic or pagan or something else. I just don't really care about religion, and I've grown quite tired of the concept that I must be defined based on my view/belief/non-belief of something that I don't ever really think all that much about. I find beauty in how things are and how we exist, not how we were created. I don't require magical thinking when I see people thinking magically on their own on a regular basis. They overcome, they persevere, and that is some of the most amazing stuff I've ever seen. I don't need the threat of hell when I see people marred by their own murky waters (from which I feel a bit like I myself am emerging presently). The Tao Te Ching sees sin as nothing more than the opaqueness that surrounds a person and prevents their natural internal light from shining through.

As an aside, I think this is why true psychopaths scare the living shit out of people - they just don't have a natural internal light. Sin does not exist in their minds in the same way it does others. It's as though their personalities are just pure black. /aside

No matter what someone's beliefs are, it doesn't determine how they are going to actually choose to act from one moment to the next. Sure, their base beliefs may shape how they live, but I don't need to actually understand those beliefs in order to see their actual actions, and I actually prefer not knowing so as not to develop false hopes or predictions regarding their behaviours. People lie to themselves all the time. A person may use their religion as their reason for doing an action, but that may not actually be their true reasons, and in the end, why should I care that they weren't compelled by their "good deeds" tenants? Now there's something to ponder. How many of one person's morals are being thrust upon another and used as an excuse to judge someone else's reason for action? Do you really care that he donated money to seek notoriety rather than out of the goodness of his heart? Take an opposite example: A person picks up a gun and points it at me. Am I to think differently of this person if I find that he's doing it in the Name Of Allah and was brainwashed in his religion from the moment he was born rather than doing it because he's starving and dodging fellow gang-bangers or doing it because he's insane and thinks the bugs growing in my head are coming to get him through the electrical currents put out by the television? Does his reasoning make his action any more or less abhorrent in my eyes?

Maybe growing up with a psycho-schizophrenic uncle really did have a profound impact on my thoughts and interactions of others.

I agree with the philosophical reasoning of Erich Fromm: authoritarianism. Religions tell people how to live and how to die, and they choose to follow these tenets because they can't or won't figure it out for themselves. It's just a fancier form of peer pressure. I do agree that they show us some interesting ideas about a culture. Most notably, of course, is the whole death thing. People are not afraid of going to sleep, but they are afraid of dying. Yet, stop for a moment and compare the two. The only major difference is that we believe that we will wake up again. The fear of closing our eyes at night, no longer existing as this person in this moment with these aspirations and these plans and these loves before us, it all disappears. The only ones that fear falling asleep are the children that still worry that the boogeyman is going to come and take them away while they sleep. What is that if not some sort of metaphor for death?

How are we to live from one day to the next? The funny thing is that religion conscripts people to follow a certain rule set, but the answers for each person is the same day in and day out: Each person lives to maximize perceived benefits of long and short term goals. That's it. I hate psychology in general, but I find certain things to be true on a regular basis, and this is the most noticeable of the bunch. I don't care what culture I'm seeing on TV, I don't care what religion a person follows, I don't care how much they have sacrificed by being a monk or by being the richest jackass on the planet. They all seem to follow the same idea of maximizing perceived benefits.

So if we are all the same, then what does religion say about our various cultures? What does it say about a group's perceived benefits? It's not just dividing the society of human kind into religious groups. Cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians. People are stereotyped and labeled because of the system of beliefs that make up their culture. Religion is just one aspect of those systems. Religion doesn't tell us how to hold our forks or chopsticks, but it does give us a peek into some of the aspects that make up that culture.

So, going back to the original question, what does my choosing to be secular and non-religious say about me and my culture? What does it say about my views on life, and my fears? I found that my love of statistics wasn't in how nice and neat little packages of data came, but in the outliers. Those things fascinated me to no end. They always had so much more to say than the little pieces of data that were behaving themselves. And yes, I'm proud of the views I have made for myself.