When I was a kid I could not understand how that line was meant to be peaceful. Even listening to the rest of the song, it was still unsettling. I was raised Catholic so the song just starts with like “imagine the worst case scenario”. As an atheist now, it’s more hopeful to me. Like imagine what the world could be like if we weren’t just biding time until we were dead. If we all just knew this was the one chance one opportunity mom’s spaghetti.
I mean… the first thesis statement in capitalism is “there is a scarcity of resources” and that dominates our lives. Yet, not when we think of life itself.
This is more relevant than most people realise. There is seemingly an increase in religion the older you get. As you said, fear of death and the comfort of something still to come.
Because at the core of every religion is a tiny grain of truth. It’s 50% intentionally fabricated nonsense, 45% poetic license and the personal interpretation of someone long dead, and maybe 5% of it is truly profound and universal
If you look at religions, they have a lot of commonalities. There is an inhuman, unknowable creator, or source. Then there’s some number of superhuman beings who serve or reject the creator, and may interact with humans. They don’t interact with the creator directly though - they’re also not human, but have some exaggerated human qualities
The abyss, the primal chaos, Ginnungagap for the Norse… It’s the nothing that spawned and makes up everything. It’s ever present, but you know it by acting in harmony with it, and destroy yourself by acting against it.
Then there’s the pantheons, servants, great spirits, naga or what have you - they’re assertions for how to live in harmony with it, some kind of greater being that is partially right and partially wrong. They’re value systems, and they make mistakes in most myths, showing the flaws. Sometimes they created the world from the abyss/chaos, sometimes they created humans, sometimes they just stumbled upon us. Or sometimes aliens that created us as a slave race, depending on how you want to see it.
And then there’s the reason for it - in one way or another, it’s to become something greater through our time alive. Often to become strong or pure enough to be able to join the deities, or to be able to exist in the void without burning to nothing.
You do it through engaging in life - mindfully doing anything will teach you truths about the universe, and through various forms of introspective meditation (or prayer) to bring yourself more in harmony with your version of the truth.
That’s all more like spirituality, but then you spend generations adding in some cautionary tales - we do live in a society after all, these are like bedtime stories that mix our history with the values our society prizes.
Often heroes grow spiritually they make distilled rules to guide the society to improve… Generally they’re pretty reasonable (in the context of the original period)
But then sometimes a more temporary spiritual leader decides they don’t like something - clearly it’s unnatural and unaligned with the truth of existence because they really hate it… So obviously it’s the will of the creator, and it gets tacked on to the guiding code.
And several hundred years later, once the religion has gained institutional power in a much larger and more hierarchical society, assholes just add in whatever is convenient. The core message is forgotten, there’s endless stuff tacked on teaching morals or history that can be reinterpreted… Or maybe society just changed, and you have to drop some rules or lose the flock
Tldr: there’s a core message of how to grow spiritually as a person, and a glimpse of something true about the nature of reality (in a very metaphorical, poetic kind of way). The promise of a reason and a goal speaks to everyone… But then they keep going, and bury the original message by teaching all sorts of other junk, often misinterpreted for an agenda centuries ago, in the same tone. Often misinterpreted today for an agenda.
(Side note, all ancient stories are super poetic and metaphorical, even historical ones… They’re probably just more fun and more easily remembered when they’re repeated around the fire for the next generation)
Religion is founded on belief, and belief allows people to feel certainty about things they’re ultimately uncertain about. As long is there is something that someone doesn’t fully understand, religion and god are a solution to bridge the gap.
When you are that person, the leap to a god is fairly logical and easy to them, since at a base level, it’s born out of a desire for someone to be in charge and in control. You understand some of the world around you. To understand it more fully, you just need a bigger, stronger, smarter version of yourself. That’s why in most religions, a god is not some transcendent, immortal, eternal, all powerful being. They’re just essentially Human+. There are way more religions with gods like Zeus than Allah. Saying that nobody is in charge, and nobody fully understands anything, and that’s all OK makes billions of people uncomfortable. And, screaming at them that they’re wrong and need to be more OK with some existential dread usually just serves to make them more uncomfortable.
human brain just wants patterns and will create it to satisfy itself. religion does not run counter to human knowledge, they’re the same process really.
“Religious suffering is the expression of real suffering and also a protest against it. Religion is the opium of the masses. Religion is the heart of a heatless world. Religion is the soul of soulless conditions.”
Religion isn’t a separate thing from culture that can be cleaved off like this. The form it takes is contingent on conditions of people’s lives and power structures. People also don’t make a conscious choice to believe or disbelieve in religion, if you’re an atheist you can’t just willingly choose to believe. Society is not directed by the willful actions of people’s collective beliefs like this either, it’s more a Darwinian process.
Also civil religion is a thing and it doesn’t necessarily align with what people think of “religion” but operates in a very similar way. A lot of atheists are probably adherents to aspects of civil religion without knowing or thinking of it this way.
if you’re an atheist you can’t just willingly choose to believe
I wouldn’t really agree with this. As a programmer, I was always sceptical and an atheist, but I never had problems with believing into something obviously not true, such as when LARPing or TTRPGs. And when I once got into a rabbit hole of mysticism in high-school, one of the movements I read about was advocating for doing “paradigm shifts”, forcing yourself to believe into a specific religion, like truly believe, so you can try it out in practice and see whether you get something out of it or not and should move on. And since that felt like a fun experiment, I tried it with various dogmas or religions, and once you get over the inherent jugement and feeling pretty stupid chanting, drawing circles and burning incense in your room (which may take a while), you may get to point where you slowly convince yourself to believe. That is, if you are serious about it. And it’s also pretty fun.
I really like the holographic theory but again that’s a theory which gives us answers, but then opens up a bunch more questions. The point of my comment was about as long as we have these fundamental questions about reality, we will have religion. I wasn’t trying to say god did it.
As a former Catholic, I can say at least personally, religion did not make me feel good. It made me feel like many thoughts and feelings I had made me a bad person. It made me smug and judgemental.
They see reality as too dismal. With faith comes hope. Uncle Roy didn’t die and leave all of his children to suffer. He was called to heaven and God will look after them. You’re not trapped in your dead end job because of lack of aptitude or opportunity or generational life choices, It’s God’s willing if you just pray a little harder and donate a little more to the church everything will come together, and if it doesn’t, The Bible says something about not needing worldly possessions right?
I think a big part of the mental blocked on both sides is people generally not understanding the difference between fact and faith.
Knowledge is about fact. It’s the realm of science, empiricism, and logic. If it can be understood and known, it belongs here.
Faith is about the unknowable (not the unknown). It’s a choice to believe something without evidence because that evidence cannot exist.
You can’t both believe something and know it.
Understanding that faith and science don’t intersect allows people to hold spiritual beliefs without rejecting knowledge and science. They don’t conflict because they’re entirely separate.
Some people aren’t wired with the mental flexibility to embrace both spiritually and empiricism. Some reject science, while others reject faith, and neither understand the other.
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