I used to be strictly materialist and atheist. Now I’m pretty spiritual. Don’t necessarily follow a religion and don’t support bigotry but yeah, I’m fairly spiritual now. This is a recent development and I never thought I’d be here like 5 years ago.
I used to be excited and optimistic about new technologies. Now I’m just jaded.
Basically all conspiracy theories, got into deep rabbit hole during Myspace days. It was weird watching all people during the pandemic gobble all that shit like it is breakfast
Until i was 24 I fell into a camp of thought called transmedicalism. Which is shitty because I am cis and didn’t support a friend because of it. By the time I learned what a jackass I was being he died. Don’t think my absence in his life was the nail in the coffin at all but there were way too many of us who ignored him when he was almost alone.
I don’t thing just doing a 180 on my opinion there was enough
Google, Reddit, etc. are good. Now I know the horrors and they are obviously our worst enemies.
That we don’t need school and it’s useless. I used to not like going to school when I was younger. Now I love it and look forward to almost every day, especially now that this is my last year in high school.
Well, both started out fine. It’s just that greed always drives everything down the shitter.
Google once had the Slogan “dont be evil” but not anymore.
Yeah I used to love google. They were the plucky upstart disrupting the microsoft ecosystem.
I used to assume police were generally trustworthy and I could believe their version of any given event. Now I believe nothing they say without supporting video evidence.
What do you mean by being spiritual? I’m an idealist so I think consciousness/subjective perception is the fundamental substrate of reality, and matter/the physical world is just an illusion, but I wouldn’t consider myself spiritual…
Not at all to imply that this is your case, but there’s a difference between having an intellectual understanding of idealism and actually having the lived experience of it.
And most people need to do some kind of practices to get there, which are typically found in spiritual contexts (meditation etc.). But there definitely are people who just kinda click into it.
Though… yes. It’s a philosophical stance but it kinda gets tossed under the umbrella of spirituality. Maybe that’s actually a problem come to think of it. Since spirituality is easier to dismiss as “woo” (as in, everything that goes against the almighty scientism is woo…)
Though you do say:
subjective perception
What do you mean? Because as an idealist, I was specifically taught to see the difference between a subjective perception and general consciousness. It’s very possible this is just semantics of course.
That’s actually the basis for Mahayana, which then transformed into multiple kinds of Buddhism. I’d consider it a pretty spiritual stance, if not only because it means that you’ve spent time thinking about what is “reality” and our role within it.
Cool, do you think the belief in physical reality can be harmful?
I think you have to operate in the framework of the sensory world when acting within the sensory world, and like using science and stuff to work out what’s likely to happen if you do certain things as opposed to other things. But that’s not the same as saying that you believe the physical world is real
I think we should use science to manipulate our senses for good, regardless of alignment with reality. But the realists say we should only use science to get closer to reality. I think they’re stifling scientific progress.
Idk why we’ve reached the point where anyone saying they’re anything but an atheist has to specify that they aren’t a bigot. Being religious doesn’t make you a bigot and being atheist doesn’t mean you aren’t one either.
I had a similar 180 though, I used to be an atheist but in the last year or so I pivoted into druidism. Turns out following a religion that focuses on spending time in nature helps to get you out of the house when you’re going though a depressive episode.
I had something similar. I grew up catholic and was very devout until I learned some stuff about myself that made me step away for a while. I expected to come back like a year later and join the episcopalians or something, but I wound up an atheist for several years. During that time I was kinda insufferable about it for a while. Then I started exploring pantheism, earth worship, and ancestor devotion because I’d felt I was missing something without religion and lighting candles to talk to my mom helped me cope with how much of my life she doesn’t get to be there for. Later an acid trip and some exploration would help me delve deeper and find the goddess I primarily pray to these days. Somewhere later I started using the Wiccan holidays because they’re really convenient for solar and seasonal observance and meditation. They also help make it so I don’t wonder where the hell the year went.
So yeah, catholic to atheist to pagan. There are many paths up the mountain, find the path that is best for you and makes you better.
Idk why we’ve reached the point where anyone saying they’re anything but an atheist has to specify that they aren’t a bigot
Most “spiritual” people adhere to one of the big organized religions, and those kinda suck in general and are rarely content to leave nonbelievers in peace.
The biggest organised religion is realism.
If we’re free to redefine “religion” as we see fit, I declare breathing a religion.
The biggest organized religion is breathing
We don’t live in a society that persecutes people for not breathing, but we do live in a society that persecutes people for not believing in reality. Genocides have been committed in the name of reality.
A genocide for not believing in reality?
Yep. Aboriginal folks don’t tend to teach their kids the white idea of reality. I’ve heard from some Indigenous people that their culture (keep in mind, there are many Aboriginal cultures) doesn’t believe in reality at all.
So the white people took Aboriginal kids away from their families and put them in white institutions and with white parents. Took away their language, their culture, their land, and gave them white patriarchal realism instead. And there was a hell of a lot of abuse. Beatings and rape. They called it “civilising” the children.
It was an attempt to exterminate Aboriginal cultures. I call that genocide.
idea of reality
Let me stop you right there bud. Reality is or isn’t. There is no idea about it.
What you’re talking about is racism.
How can you not believe in reality? Do they think we live in the Matrix?
I think some people can be overly smug about their lack of belief, but I don’t think that means it’s akin to a religion
Realism isn’t about lack of belief. Solipsism is about lack of belief. Realism is about an unshakeable faith in the existence of an external world beyond the senses. Soulism is about making the best of the world within one’s senses. Out of the three main approaches to reality, the realists have the most belief, and are most easily cut down by Occam’s razor. That a world beyond our senses exists is an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence. It is nothing to base one’s life around. It is better to work to improve the malleable world within our senses, than to strive for Plato’s world of forms.
The biggest organized religion is breathing
an atheist has to specify that they aren’t a bigot
Being religious doesn’t make you a bigot
Looking at the entire history of (a) faith-based religion, versus (b) evidence-based science
I have to say:
- learn history
- fuck you, you ignorant evil-enabling asshat
Certain units of the Japanese Army conducted a lot of inhumane scientific experiments on human subjects they racially discriminated against during WWII, and the evidence collected was retained by the USA.
I want to note that none of this was valid science, the results were worthless because they prioritized torture and didn’t document their “experiments” and their results properly. Same for medical Nazi “research”.
Though it’s true that you don’t need religion to do evil acts.
Maybe the Japanese Empire didn’t, but the Nazis were explicitly Christian.
the Nazis were explicitly Christian.
Eh, publicly Christian 100%, but there were plenty of anti-Christian views from Goebbels, and then there’s the Occultism in Nazism as well.
That being said, Positive Christianity was 100% a tool to manipulate the people into doing the State’s will, trying to eject Catholicism from Germany.
Not really. They were certainly white supremacists and hated Jews, but Christianity didn’t really play a big role in their ideology. They spent a lot more time supressing local churches than going on about how christian they are, and many of them were very interested in pagan religions.
This is revisionist bullshit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Nazi_Germany
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_Nazi_Germany#Accommodation_to_Nazism
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-role-of-clergy-and-church-leaders
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-german-churches-and-the-nazi-state
the us thought they were getting a deal from the japanese when they conducting biological experiments on chinese people, but they were getting all fluff results
evidence based science conducted the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Let’s infect black people with syphilis and see what happens! They aren’t really people, so are like monkeys so if they die from untreated diseases it’s not a big deal!
scientific practice both past and present is often rife with racism.
but don’t let the facts of the world get in the way of your worship of science as a religion.
Guaranteed that was run by Christian White Racists
Arguing for faith is literally saying “I will believe anything on no evidence, and I think the following…”
Sorry, I stopped listening when you told me you don’t know how to think as an adult
right, anyone who says anything that disproves you is wrong and bad.
clearly throwing tantrums and calling people names is a thing only very mature adults too. toddlers don’t do that… ever
There’s no denying that most of the major religions are rooted in racism, and many still promote hate against certain people.
That being said, “fuck you, you ignorant evil enabling asshat” sure sounds like you are making assumptions and vilifying someone you’ve never met based on one trait that you do not agree with.
Sorry, bro, but you’ve become the monster you’re trying to fight.
Idk why we’ve reached the point where anyone saying they’re anything but an atheist has to specify that they aren’t a bigot
The main issue is that the cohort of people with megaphones broadcasting their spirituality is virtually entirely comprised of profiteers.
Like all such parasites they follow the pattern of establishing out groups for you to despise, simply because it drives engagement better. Same reason all major social media now attempts to shape you into a being of hatred and impulse. It keeps you stressed and activated so you jump at the opportunity when they offer to let you spend money to blow off some of the steam.
Bigotry as a phenomenon has many origins, but wherever it springs from it ultimately doubles as an inherently appealing strategy for those who wish wring dry their community.
At any rate, as we all sit here dying around the same poisoned watering hole, we see these profiteers dressing just like us while actively dumping the poison in. Ashamed, we feel compelled to proclaim, “I am not them! They only wear my clothes!”
Spirituality is an incredibly comfortable and practical “clothing” for many people. You’re absolutely correct in drawing attention to how bad it sucks that the people who embrace that comfort now feel pained to differentiate themselves from the abusers who pervert their fashion
Yeah, I had a world-shaking 180 for spirituality after I read about Zen Buddhism.
I was a really proud atheist and thought all religions were just believing in something supernatural. Until I actually gave an intellectually honest try at understanding them. Most theistic religions I couldn’t get on board with but after I read Three Pillars of Zen, something just clicked and I joined my local sangha. Also begun to understand a bit more about religiosity in general after, though I’m still not a fan of Abrahamic religions in particular.
You say you were “intellectually honest” so I’m curious what it was about Zen that appealed to that kind of approach?
The way I was introduce to it framed it specifically as not believing in anything you can’t verify in your own direct experience. The book I read ( https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/89766/the-three-pillars-of-zen-by-roshi-philip-kapleau/ ) was actually pretty mercilessly pointing out how much of what I thought to be obviously true was actually just a belief. Meaning what I think is the average westerner experience of the world as explained by science. It didn’t offer me a set of ideas to believe in, it offered me a way of disbelieving anything I couldn’t know for myself to be true.
Like I said it was pretty world shattering. I realized there is a world BEFORE any thought and that is definitely more real than anything I can think about. I joined the local sangha because things got a little weird for me for a time and my friends kinda thought I was going crazy haha but in my perspective they were the ones alarmingly missing something incredibly important. And I still kinda think they are but it’s not my place to try to “convert” them. Since there’s no point. You need to have the active desire to actually understand.
But aren’t there things that you can objectively know to be true? Wouldn’t this just lead to believing whatever you want to believe?
I feel a little timid about trying to answer this because at this point, I know that people can talk about these things intellectually forever and it just won’t… click. It’s so hard to write about too because if I tried to write in a way that very perfectly reflects my experience, the text becomes weird and cumbersome ( and then when I don’t, people try some gotchas like “ahaa but you refer yourself as “I”, doesn’t that mean you still believe in an individual self”, no but writing more precisely gets in the way of the message ).
First, believing whatever I want to believe is definitely a danger and actually you see this a lot in spiritual discourse that leans towards Buddhism, especially via New Age stuff and “McMindfulness”. Many people happily discard the mainstream beliefs but then they get hooked on their idea of what is true. But the merciless approach that Zen Buddhism has is that nothing you think about is totally true. It’s more like a reflection in a mirror ( Interestingly Plato was also alluding to this in his Allegory of The Cave, so this realization isn’t unique to Zen ).
That includes the concept of “objectivity”. Objectivity relies on the idea that there is some external third party to human experience. But once I looked, or more like was forced to face it, I realized that there is no such thing. I can exchange ideas with what appear to be other people and have an agreement. Like we can probably both agree that we’re looking at a screen now. I anticipate an objection here on the “other people”. I don’t know if “other people” exist outside of me but I know that I don’t have control over anything that appears in my mind. Something that I can call “other people” appears, and they have their likes and dislikes and it can be painful if I’m not respectful of that. This is where compassion teachings come in.
Oh and I’m not anti-science at all. Science is great at revealing patterns in the way things appear. Happy to go get my vaccinations and all that.
Okay, thank you for explaining.
I admit I don’t get it, but maybe I’ll consider reading that book. It seems I had a mistaken idea about Buddhism. Or at least Zen Buddhism.
What they describe is similar to the discourse in western philosophy about the mind and the objective reality. There is no way to prove or disprove that the reality exists outside of the mind of the observer, i.e. that solipsism is true or false. But it also follows that solipsism is practically useless. So we must agree that we probably have a shared experience with other people, which we’ll call ‘reality’. Then the question is, how close the experience of one observer is to that of other people. This is where stuff like qualia comes in, which posits that it’s impossible to qualify immediate perceptual experiences, because each person only refers to what they themselves have experienced. It could easily be that one person’s sensory experience and perception of the world is wholly different from that of another person. It seems, though, that in practice we have a shared vocabulary for our perceptions and use that to build our knowledge of the world.
@[email protected] does this sound like an accurate interpretation of your concept?
Tell me you had a certain experience without telling me you had a certain experience.
Were you specifically taught to not talk in certain terms about how your world “shattered”? Because I was.
I was, yes. I think even if I wasn’t I probably wouldn’t use those terms anyway since in online discourse it never looks good.
There are LGBT friendly churches run by LGBT Christians. Are they conveniently ignoring certain parts of the Bible? Sure but all Christians do that
First of all, I liked America as a kid, that opinion changed fast. I was very fundamentalist Cristian conservative, but this strongly went against my values of compassion at some point, and I was the type to constantly question things. So at first I just lost faith due to how there was no evidence for Cristianity being based on anything real, since I would be putting my own and other’s wellbeing for a belief in what is anectodal evidence, I told myself that I had proof, I would believe it, I got tricked, and started to believe in it again, then did a 180 AGAIN.
I would see trans people as degenerate freaks, but by some point, I knew this was irrational, and then a friend revealed they were trans, and I didn’t show even a hint of the disgust, even though I was weirded out, I just went with the online trans support script on how I’m supposed to act, but I had like zero experience (or personality). So they kind of faded out of my life, sadly. Either way, they instantly Wolololo’d me just by existing. I no longer think ill of trans people, but ngl, thinking about their very happy expression as they stretch some latex shit they found, still weirds me out (not trans related).
I as far as recently, utterly hated furries, and would see them as groomers. Again, having furry friends helped, but I was never 100% comfortable for a long time, until I meet a certain (ironically no longer furry) person. No, I did not do a 180, I was guarded and would sometimes be rude and dismissive. I disliked a game for being furry, but I basically grew into it thanks to OpenMindedness™ that again, developed from some sort of philosophy.
(Note: this is getting to dense to phrase properly, so I will try to make it more TL;DR).
I was asexual for more than one reason, I was questioning why I was like that, but never did anything about it, until ironically a roleplay bot did something inappropriate that I punished it for, but it made me think, and I knew I was cutting myself out of a very human experience for dumb reasons, went very freakish on Reddit and Lemmy NSFW for a while, then due to both constraints, and my well…moral disgust with humans, I did a 180 AGAIN, and I’m now at least behaving like an asexual, my only exception is a friend who I don’t directly have an NSFW relation with, but I talk NSFW, and I’m more than willing to hear him out on anything they need (so long as it’s not myself).
A few other things: I used to be very bootstraps, which ruined me. I do believe help is important (but no longer have the trust for it). For a long time, I valued forgiving and accepting people, and I put up with a lot. This unfortunately, has come to an end as well, and I am VERY wrathful now, want to smell burnt flesh level of wrathful, cut off friends suddenly level of wrathful, cut myself from things I need to hurt others level of wrathful. It took a long time of what amounts of being tortured, and massive injustice for me to become like that, and it serves a purpose, it is not a character flaw. There are many things I forgot and don’t think about here that are an extreme departure of my previous beliefs, and I am nothing like my old self, and my old self would probably want to burn my new self at a stake.
Hanlon’s razor
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”
Evil does exist, and it wears the mask of imbecility
Religion and politics.
Was raised Christian (Protestant; not sure which subchapter, but I’ve sung Psalms in whole-notes, rhythm, organ or drum and guitar - it didn’t matter much), but turned secular/atheist around the time The New Atheists (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris - the four horsemen, lmao) went around. Part was several youtube videos, part The Selfish Gene audiobook.
Nowadays, I still consider myself atheist, though I call myself heathen after the pre-Christian religion(s?) we used to have in the Netherlands (which is basically Norse mythology, but we call Odin Wodan, and Thor Donar. We also have a few extra figures like Frau Holle, some local legends, etc. I also wear two rings with the Elder Futhark alphabet, and a chain with Thor’s Hammer.
I just think Germanic Myths and Legends are just neat.
Regarding politics: I used to regard myself as Liberal, but the more I learn about Liberalism (starting at John Locke, and ending with John Rawls) the less I like it. It feels like it’s individualism and egoism to an extreme, and I think it will be damaging to humanity at large in the long term.
What would replace it? I’m not sure yet. I do feel we should probably try to get families living closer to each other, to ensure they can better support each other - nowadays a family can easily live all over just fine, which just means they’ll grow apart. Yes, yes, not every family can do that, because some families are assholes, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Our capitalistic system is breaking the family tribe apart, and I think that’s bad for everyone involved.
Also, forced paternity tests. If men get the burden of fatherhood legally shoved onto them, then they should get legal evidence the child is theirs. I think cuckery (raising another’s child without knowing - not the sexual act) is a deeply immoral move, a deep and traitorous move, and if women use the legal framework to force men to pay for support, then they should be OK with us using the exact same framework to support ourselves, right? That would only be fair, right?
Politics. We have always been a conservative family (to relate: “conservative” here is the equivalent of the US Democrats, not Republicans!). My grandfather was a party cofounder and lived next door to our countries first chancellor after the war.
But the sheer disregard for the law by the (conservative) chancellor who was in office when I grew up turned me to the political left.
that getting into biotech/research field is actually harder than people think and the statistic heavily skewed towards health in job search and is on part with unemployment rate of the next highest rate of stem majors. plus its also HEAVILY gatekeeped so that the amount of scientists already employed dont have to compete with less salaries of fresh graduate pipeline.
Israel was justified in their (initial) retaliation for October 7.
Gone so far in the other direction that I now firmly believe Israel should be wiped off the fucking map. Decades of propaganda convinced me they weren’t violent colonizers.
Fuck Israel. From the river to the sea.
That I was a straight Christian.
Freeing myself from those chackles are probably the biggest pivots in my life.
I was raised in a somewhat homophobic household. One of my friend groups throughout high school was pretty densely LGBT, and so I grew. Exposure was all it really took.
I used to hate when Avatar: The Last Airbender aired. The episodes felt like they lasted forever, and I had no interest in anything that was going on. I finally finished watching it about a year ago, and it is one of my favorite shows to date.
