this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
547 points (94.8% liked)
Asklemmy
43786 readers
943 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
You might be in some kind of bubble or assuming a lot about strangers based on your own experiences. Lots of people authentically and personally choose to be atheists after being raised within some kind of faith and coming to the conclusion that it is not something they believe in. Others like me were simply raised without the influence of any religion and it all just seems absurd. It’s not being edgy or any kind of performance, perhaps it was for some people you’ve known, but I imagine for most it’s a personal choice (or lack thereof) that they have no reason to tell you or anyone else about or broadcast in any way because the entire enterprise is meaningless to them and really just isn’t something they even think about very much.
Here's the problem with your argument.
If you had this stuff shoved down your throat as a kid, it's still there - no matter what you choose to believe in your adult life. It's very easy to decide what you believe when you're relaxing on your sofa... but that might not matter when you undergo events that are psychologically traumatic. It's called a regressive state - a term I actually picked up reading the torture manuals the CIA used to train it's death squads in Latin America. There's a very good reason you have people from these "prosperity gospel" scams hanging around drug rehab centers and mental asylums - it's just so much easier getting their claws into people when they've undergone such traumas and are vulnerable. I've lived long enough to have experienced it myself and watched others experience it - it's not pretty. It's scary, because it implies that we are not as much in control of our own psyches as we'd like to think we are, and that's perfectly understandable.
I've been musing on this a bit. Like, what is it REALLY like in someone's head, spiritually, if they literally grow up with a non-monotheistic religion?
I read a lot of books, esp. sci-fi and fantasy which are prone to messing around with all sorts of things including religion, but I haven't actually read a good one that really "demonstrated" what having a polytheistic or animist spirituality is like.
Maybe taking a look into eastern asian cultures would be close enough? A good portion of their mythos treat gods as powerful beings that can fall from grace and be defeated. Also, in Chinese Taoism, humans responsible for great deeds can ascend into godhood
Most of India might also provide a very good look into how people who grew into a polytheistic society act and think about their own spirituality. Japanese Shintoism might be the closest look into an "easily accessible" animist look