Thread with 15 posts
jump to expanded post
you know, when something really weird happens to you, something profoundly unsettling that shakes you to the core… regardless of how mentally ill you may or may not be, regardless of how religious you may or may not be… certain little bits of religiosity may acquire new meaning
i think the “serenity prayer” is like this for us now, in some form or other. we have not been religious for a very, very long time now, almost half our lives; and at this point, if we pick up any religion seriously again, it won't be anything shaped like christianity…
…but that particular prayer is quite beautiful regardless.
that “psychosis prayer” we wrote the other day is very obviously just an adaptation of the serenity prayer, it's not lost on us; and again we do not put any actual religious weight on it, but we, you know, grew up christian, so we still find christian things a little moving.
i'm not sure if our current (and here i mean even how it was long before this psychosis thing!) relationship to christianity, of finding the symbols a little meaningful even if we disagree that there is any true metaphysical weight behind them, is especially sacrilegious or not…
there might be some traditions of christian thought that permit or even praise this type of engagement with it, though? one of the many nuances of religion is how “religious atheist” is not, in fact, an oxymoron, in several ways actually, even in theistic religions!
but i think we're happier remaining firmly on the atheistic side of what a “religious atheist” can be, it's just… a little bit fun to briefly pretend at some level we don't know that the stuff we spent half our lives absorbing every sunday is something we reject… it's nostalgic
an insight that must be horribly brain-breaking for some people, and would have been for us at around… 15 years old or so, but which we've probably had for… maybe a decade at this point, is that believing in god and such things is a choice, actually, we could do it if we wanted
in our original conception of it, we became irreligious involuntarily, because we had a sudden loss of belief when told a particularly convincing story about how, you know, earth has no special place in the universe, and (our assumption:) therefore the israelites don't either
but it was obvious at the time, and especially looking back on it, that we had wanted that to happen, and deliberately sought it out, regardless of what we may have claimed; the atheist-curious will eventually become an atheist one way or another, if given enough time, perhaps
we must apologise for writing about this if you do happen to be religious and have never thought deeply about why you believe what you believe, because (and we do not mean this in the "mentally ill" way) we do realise that talking about this may make someone lose their mind, alas
maybe we should read the book of proverbs from start to finish, something like that… that might be fun
we genuinely have no idea how "sane" we would sound to the average person when talking about religion at this point, especially not in this state of course; what i can tell you is if this all sounds like an "insane viewpoint", i'm afraid we must have been insane for half our life
the incurious atheist is the worst kind. if you are blessed by suddenly finding yourself in a radically different frame, at least use it to observe the old frame from outside and learn shit! e.g. it's really cool knowing both a christian and secular historiography of christianity
curiosity is perhaps the highest virtue to us, can you tell?