“Chasm City” by Alastair Reynolds. It’s a standalone novel in a much bigger Revelation Space series. But the plot of this book is quite independent of the series, you don’t need to know the lore to understand it. I think it is very well suited for a movie or a short series.
The setting is hard SciFi, very detailed, but not too crazy.
I think you’re describing agnostic beliefs, believing there might be a god but not conforming to any religion and basically otherwise being an atheist.
(Not too be confused with Gnostic beliefs, which was a branch of Christianity)
I’m a strong atheist, which means I have a positive belief that no gods exist, just for the record. The way I would put it is that I have never heard of nor have been able to come up with a god concept that I believe is an actual being.
I prefer to use the term “god concept” rather than god to make it clear that we’re talking about a specific idea of a god rather than an actual being. So Odin is a god concept, as is Minerva. Multiple god concepts exist in the bible, including the original regional father-deity El, El’s wife Ashera, their children including Yahweh, and so on. When the Israelites started to move from polytheism to henotheism (many gods exist but you should only worship one), and then to “monotheism” (in scare quotes because there are enough different god concepts as well as divine beings who would be counted as gods in any other pantheon).
In any case, I don’t think having a god concept which you believe refers to an actual being in itself is an indication of anything, good or bad. In my opinion, there’s a feedback loop between the disposition of people and their religions. The problems come in when the religions around the god concepts become extreme. The Amish have a fairly strong god concept, and while I’m not Amish (thank god), I don’t think they do harm unless you think of their actions within their community. 90% of UUs are great people. Sponoza’s Watchmaker would suggest we have to study ourselves to discover what constitutes good. And so on.
So I’d say that your belief is absolutely fine, but you also might be interested in the neurophysiological, social, and anthropological bases of humans so often having god concepts.
Yes. Had religion shoved down my throat as a kid. Learned early on being a religious believer meant nothing, people are shitty no matter what.
Had to decide who I wanted to be, what rules to live by. Realized I don’t enjoy hurting people, try to learn from mistakes, random acts of kindness, to always try for the evolved, educated non violent option. That’s enough for me. If there’s a god who has a problem with that, oh well.
I grew up as a Lutheran Christian in a small, conservative town—and attended Sunday School/summer Bible camp for many years—but became an agnostic after I began questioning things at 16 years old. About a month after that, I became an atheist. I’ve been one since… so almost 14 years.
Unfortunately, I was afraid to tell my parents, so I still went to church with my family almost every Sunday until I left at 18. I was also still effectively forced to be anacolyte/perform piano/sing in the choir/attend most other church activities. Fucking painful.
I still haven’t told my parents, though, and probably never will; it’d cause more pain than anything else, sadly.
I wonder how many other people at the mosque secretly think the same as you? If you have children, do you think they will be less constrained than you? In which case, there is some hope that the next generation will escape the strictures of organised religion.
It just gets… dumber? It’s pretty subjective though.
Spoiler alert- Creatures from other dimensions with mind control technology spanning entire spacetime cannot squash humanity because of a single human/protomolecule hybrid - Laconia’s absolute compliance with Duarte ruling is so mindless. No conspirators apart from a lone mad scientist… no one even tried to use protomolecule technology to take over the power. - Humanity adopted protomolecule technology and colonized hundreds of worlds all within lifetime of main characters. The power belongs to Laconian empire. But they still cannot get insurgents found and punished. There is a fucking asteroid base, and Laconians cannot find it.
Not a dumb part, but the main characters, being separated for a long time, don’t get their own interesting storylines. It seems like authors got bored with characters and didn’t know what to do with them. New characters are usually boring. Duarte’s daughter, Kamal’s son - they are just background… The only strong character in focus is Tanaka.
Ah ok, I see. Well I want to be clear, if someone is interested in reading, don’t be deterred by this, make your own opinion. My wife and I loved every book. I really liked Amos’ trajectory especially.
To touch on how I interpreted your points in the story (CONTAINS SPOILERS AND I DON’T KNOW HOW TO HIDE THEM):
-It pointed out the higher dimension beings couldn’t actually pinpoint anything in our spacetime unless a huge amount of energy was released at the exact moment we crossed their dimension through the gates. -It seemed to me that everyone was scared of duarte and even more scared of modifying themselves with protomolecule after his “coma” where he killed someone instantly. -I think I remember the Laconians basically being arrogant and underestimating everyone.
I hear that you have a different opinion and maybe you got burnt out on the books, but I really hope the show finishes them up because I enjoyed them.
I very much doubt you’ll find anyone here who discourages you from stepping away from organized religion.
I’m a former Christian pastor on a hiatus from church life, but in no way done with being a Christian in my private life.
I believe the Bible boils religion down to three basic life roles for every individual person to follow: priest, steward, and keeper.
As a priest, every person is meant to determine how they ought best to live.
As steward they are to take care of the world around them in accordance with their beliefs.
As their “brother’s keeper” they should work to ensure everyone else is free from coercion to believe and live how they think is best.
When people function in all three roles they are revealing the “image of God”.
Live your best life and help others do the same to the best of your ability. Or, as James the brother of Jesus, said, true religion is this: “to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”
There is significant propability by just beeing here that you were hurt in the past and you didn’t heal properly. First step before acknowledging the pain is to go to a safe place, where there are no toxic people and where your basic needs are met. Hurt people are like magnet for toxic people, and hurt people are comforted by familiarity of toxicity.
According to my perspective, having autonomy is core to being human and most religious structures actively work to squash autonomy and force conformity. I think that is harmful for everyone.
For me, it’s taken time to even recognize how hurt I was and I’m still going through a healing process.
asklemmy
Hot
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.