Comment by ItsHarper
9 months ago
I'm not the person you responded to, but In my experience most people who choose the label of "atheist" have spent time looking into religion. The nonreligious people who haven't are much more likely to just describe themselves as non-religious.
As an atheist, the only time or two I've felt an urge to pray has been when I've felt very alone, and missed the comfort that came from praying and believing that someone with real power was listening. If that's what you believe, of course that's going to feel comforting (plus it provides opportunity for mindfulness and reflection).
Both fortunately and unfortunately, Christianity (which you did not mention, but your language is consistent with) did not hold up to scrutiny for me, so that full level of comfort isn't there, but thankfully many of the benefits can be found in meditation.
If you’re looking for comfort in Christianity, I agree that you aren’t going to find it. Jesus explicitly says that we will suffer in this life. There are comforts in the Christian life but on the whole, it’s not a tool for finding “benefits” or feeling fulfilled.
I'd certainly have agreed with that! But it's only the occasional comfort it brought me that I miss, obviously I don't miss making sacrifices in exchange for an afterlife I don't believe in.
The comfort that religion such as Christianity gives is in the belief that any suffering is temporary and meaningful, while the state of non-suffering that shall follow will be permanent.
As an atheist who still holds up some religion mostly because of fear, I genuinely fear very small outcomes and sometimes I genuinely feel like luck is on my side when statistically it shouldn't have been and then I praise the "lord"
I wasn't born into christianity but rather hinduism.
My critique of your statement is that I personally don't see any difference b/w suffering and non suffering in an infinite scale, our bodies will adjust to it.... suffering has its meaning because its finite.
You could very vaguely quantify suffering at a neurological level,I think.
But the meaning of the suffering is derived from its temporal nature. If suffering is permanent, my point is, is that there would be no difference b/w suffering or euphoria.
There are other critiques as well.
I just don't understand, I know why I follow religion, its mostly fear and some really lucky moments.
I don't wish to pray to god, I wish to pray to universe in some sense. Thanking the universe, I just have named it god because I find him more approachable..., more personal I guess, but I know its fiction.
To be clear, I wasn't referring to Hell or anything like that, especially since the notion is rather fuzzy in Christianity and is completely absent in e.g. Judaism, so it's not a universal monotheistic thing, but rather to day-to-day pain and suffering As to your point that suffering or non-suffering is made irrelevant by permanence, I think not everyone would agree, but more importantly, humans in general aren't particularly good at dealing with infinities, even imaginary ones. So the selling point there isn't so much so the abstract philosophical notion of eternal bliss, but rather the very concrete one of not having to ever again deal with some painful events that you regularly face IRL, like starvation or your small children dying.
Regarding your take, it reminds me of how in David Brin's Uplift series, humans are mostly non-religious but often invoke a deity called "Ifny", short for "Infinity", which is basically a personification of luck as you describe it. It's not an uncommon thing, either - indeed, I would argue that most pre-monotheistic religions are largely that, just with specialized gods responsible for different manifestations of luck, so to speak (so e.g. you'd pray / sacrifice to the god of harvest to ensure that no unlucky events would happen this year that'd ruin it).
Monotheism is rather different, though, and I think it can be distilled down to the archetype of a perfect government - which would also explain why it only arose sometime after the first large centralized states, and was largely spread by them. But this also takes care of the "unlucky" angle in a sense that there's simply no such thing as luck in a perfectly ordered universe.