You likely also participate in rituals that were taught to you that are not solely grounded in logic or science. Do you do things in a certain order for no reason other than your parents taught you to do so? Do you avoid eating certain foods because you never ate them growing up?
People who are raised religious may not be fanatic believers, but they may still be “culturally religious” e.g. take part in Ramadan, avoid eating pork, because that’s the way they grew up, and a lot of the time it means they can be included in cultural matters of the community they come from.
As for why some people are proper religious, fully believing and all, I also don’t think all beliefs have to be rational. Some beliefs are comforting. If it helps someone to get through a difficult time by believing there’s a higher power rooting for them, or who has pre-planned their suffering for a greater good, they may choose to believe that because it’s mentally easier. Arguably that is a rational belief anyway because it benefits you and makes your life easier to get through.
Wait, there’s more: Some people are skeptical even of religion, yet still practice a religion.
We reconcile that by:
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admitting that we can’t make sense of everything
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recognizing that many of the ways our religion interacts with reality are aspirational rather than descriptive
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rejecting dogma
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choosing to persevere in doubt rather than cling to false certainty
Can I ask what religion you practice and what drives you to continue?
I’m Christian, Episcopalian. What drives me to continue practicing? There’s a lot of things:
Socially, I enjoy the sense of community that comes with being an active member of a congregation, and it provides both a reminder to and a venue for giving back in the form of volunteering and charity.
Personally, I appreciate the rhythm it gives to my weeks and years, with specific times set aside for joy and grief, reflection and action, uncomfortable growth and quiet recovery.
Spiritually, I draw both comfort and strength from my relationship with God; whether or not this is a spiritual sort of “rubber ducking” doesn’t change how it affects me.
Morally, I think the example of Christ is a good one to follow, and again, that doesn’t really depend on Him being a real historical figure.
Very nicely put. This describes my own faith almost to a T.
Does it bother you that only one of those criteria is actually tied to faith in a god’s existence?
Sometimes!
My college chaplain often said “If religion makes you comfortable you’re doing it wrong.” So, yes, I’m bothered that so much of my connection to my religion is circumstancial, but I’d rather be uncomfortable about it than dishonest with myself. And admittedly, I’m kind of at a low point right now, so my answers might be very different in eighteen months.
That said, God exists or doesn’t regardless of what I believe. I don’t particularly need to take anything on faith to find value in my religion.
Why is it good that it makes you uncomfortable? And I’ll go a step further and ask whether all discomfort regarding religion is good. For example, was your chaplain saying you should be uncomfortable because you’re not sure if it’s rooted in truth, or were they saying you should be going out of your comfort zone and challenging yourself to do more and/or expressing your faith in new ways? If so, are the two equivalent?
I’m asking in genuine curiosity: I grew up Catholic, and never felt much of a community motivation for my religion. Once I got to college, I mostly stopped going to church, with occasional bursts where I’d decide to go for a month or so. So going to church dried up before my faith did for me, and I don’t really understand going in the absence of faith.
I hung on as an agnostic theist for years, though lately I think I’ve been more of an agnostic atheist. I agree with your sentiment on God existence not being predicated on belief, but have also reached the conclusion that if I need belief to accept something as true, it probably isn’t.
Definitely the “go out of your comfort zone” take. Christ loves us as we are, but you can’t stay the same, act the same, and have the true repentance required for salvation. Striving to be better is not comfortable. Confronting your own sins is not comfortable. Empathizing with the downtrodden is not comfortable. Going out and getting your hands dirty and your bank account emptier to help the poor, the sick, the widowed and orphaned, the homeless, the hurting is not comfortable. But that’s what the example of Christ requires us to do.
How do you reconcile that with your discomfort about much of your connection to religion being circumstantial? Isn’t that very different than what you just told me?
After all, the post you just gave me is the practiced rhetoric of a firm believer. You were able to fall back into it quite easily, but does it accurately reflect how you really feel? Do you still feel this tie to Christ and that you are being held to this divine mandate given that you were saying you (your faith?) was at a low point a couple posts earlier?
Did you grow up religious? Or maybe more specifically, did you grow up around this religious group and established connections young?
yes to both
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Doublethink, bro. Doublethink.
I’m curious what you mean by “drop their skepticism.”
I believe the universe was created and I also believe that modern science does an incredibly good job describing the way it functions to the best of our ability. I do not believe the idea of religion is 100% at odds with science
By drop their skepticism I mean dropping their scientific mindset of theories are not facts, an experiment needs to be reproduceable, etc. I don’t believe that science disproves religion but I do believe there are too many unproveable aspects of most religions for me to be too skeptical to believe in fully
Gotcha gotcha
What if I were to propose to you that there’s no way to prove that matter comes before consciousness? For all you know, everything exists inside consciousness but most people believe matter is the prior condition. This is pure logic. But when it’s brought up to science minded people, they tend to get very uppity about it.
Beliefs be like that.
I see where you’re drawing the correlation because we can neither prove nor disprove the existence of higher powers the same as I can’t tell you whether you are a brain floating in amniotic fluid running through a simulation or not. People approaching philosophical questions usually reach an impasse because that is the nature of philosophy.
But a religious person would be more akin to someone telling you that they know we are in fact floating brains powering an AI civilization. They can’t provide you with solid proof but you are incorrect if you think otherwise.
No but the latter is what science-minded people do. They insist that matter comes before consciousness without being able to prove it, though what’s extremely obvious in everyone’s direct experience is that consciousness is needed before anything else is said about the world. It’s a false status quo.
There is a prevelant theory but it’s still an unanswered philosophical question that noone truly intelligent would tell you they knew definitively. Anyone asserting that matter 100% comes before conciousness is on the same wavelength as someone telling you there is 100% a god controlling everything.
So we can at least agree that people who are confident in something unproveable are objectively unintelligent.
You’re wiggling a bit but let’s go with that and get to your original question.
Based on your responses, you probably hold a core belief that matter comes before consciousness. You’re smart enough to admit it’s not a certainty but you’ve probably lived your whole life fairly assured it’s the case. You speak English well so you have at least been exposed to western culture - which is very materialistic (religious or no, Christianity is also functionally materialistic), and so the core belief both serves you well, and is positively reinforced.
Any new information you get is subconsciously aligned to this core belief. Any decision you make is informed by it. You have a network of data in your head and it all connects to this and some other core beliefs. The same way a religious person can be highly logical but they hold a different core belief and so subtly, everything they know aligns to that belief. The more irrational the core belief, the more convoluted the links are of course but it makes sense to them - they just may not be able to represent it to you with the symbols that is language. And sometimes you’ll just get them doing the loading screen face when they try to rationalize their views - then it just becomes a question of which core VALUE is deeper for them; rationality or their religious view.
If rationality is more valuable, it necessarily demolishes the religious view. It demolishes a core belief to which they have aligned all their knowledge about the world. Which is a hell of a trip, and can be very scary. Which is also why rationality often loses.
Born and raised in north america, went to a baptist church as a kid so I’m fairly familiar with the bible as well as different types of religious people you’ll meet.
As an agnostic now, my only core belief is I know that I don’t know. That’s something I apply to any philosophical question so it’s alien to me that some people can separate logic and religion.
For me, I get that logic too is just models that predict things. Backwards or forwards. But it doesn’t answer what anything is. You can only EXPERIENCE what something is, but you can never accurately represent it. Because the moment you try to represent an experience, it’s not the experience itself, just a representation. So logical conclusion is that the only way to know something for sure, is to experience it as it is before any representation.
People with religious experiences may get to the ineffable truth but then they get enamored by their own attempts to represent it. They focus on the representation, instead of the experience, and they start to insist that their representation is the bestest and most correctest - because everything in their head aligns to it. Then it just becomes a matter of who has the most charismatic foghorns and the most appealing representation. Which has a very reasonable logic of it’s own, as far as it goes.
Logic is reasoning based on proveable facts so no it’s not going to tell you what something is, just how probable something is.
That wouldn’t be the logical conclusion because we are limited as humans. We make mistakes, we don’t understand everything, we misremember, we can even gaslight ourselves such as the mandela effect. If 50 people told me they experienced an alien abduction, that doesn’t make it logically true, now if they were to show me proveable facts of the abduction then I would be more inclined to believe.
I’m not sure what you mean with the last paragraph, you are clearly describing illogical subjective experiences but calling them “very reasonable logic of it’s own”. What you are describing isn’t logic, what you’re describing is the opposite of logic. Someone claiming something they believe is true but can’t provide validity.
veritassium did a video replicating a FASCINATING study that proves that logical people get dramatically less logical when they encounter facts that contradicts their deeply held beliefs; they get even less logical that “non-logical” people
so they don’t consolidate the 2 sides of themselves; instead they apply their logic to the things that they don’t care much about and get less logical on the subjects/topic that they care more about it.
Man brains are so weird. Thank you for that video!
‘Man brains’ is different to ‘Man, brains’.
