this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2024
260 points (81.4% liked)
Asklemmy
43745 readers
2068 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Because there is no downside. I mean, the only thing that atheist think is appealing is that they can reason themselves out of religion. What makes you think that 'reasoning yourself out of religion' is attractive, desirable or a worthy goal? It just isn't. It leads to existential crisis in most if not all cases. And then atheist take pride in surviving that crisis. Which, sure, admirable... But attractive? Of course not.
You can be religious and do anything in the world. Literally. I know that atheist love to focus on dumb fucks and literalists, and on how religions are being abused. But the truth is that religion is deeply personal and peoples relation with religion is completely their own. It's extremely simple to pick and choose from the myriad of options within religion. Most religious people are not literalists.
And then you get connection with people, see them regularly, participate in rituals, celebration days, rules for engagement with life.
Plus, don't forget, an extremely old and mystic piece of human history. The attempts of people to live in a world that has a God. Their struggles, their victories. In essence a reflection on the human condition. And you get to be part of that. Atheist are often too fast to explain religion as a sort of 'failed science', while it's absolutely not. And of course if you can't figure that out you're going to ask why people want to believe in something like that.
There will never be a rational reason for the human condition. Religion will never ever not be part of humanity. As the only way in which the human condition can be contextualised is in a world that is created, and religions are the keepers of that knowledge.
I think for a lot of atheist converts it becomes hard to keep the alternate reality going, and so reasoning out of it becomes unavoidable. Some people are raised atheist. Personally, I just like to know things even if it sucks.
I suspect that's not actually true at a global level. In Africa many people are so literalist they'll believe they're bulletproof because a spell was cast. Even in the West there's areas where I'm guessing most churchgoers believe funny things about natural history.
There are billions of religious people in the world. I understand that there are millions of examples of people who are literalist and dumb. Religion has a lot of pitfalls. But most religious people are navigating religion in a personal and open manner, avoiding those pitfalls and using the same examples to do so.
Again, I'm not sure that's actually true. I suspect literalists may be a small majority.
I get along with religious people of all sorts in real life, to be clear, but I don't think the progressive, quiet Christian or Muslim is as universal as the average Lemmy user may think it is, based on where they live.