this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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[–] artemisia@beehaw.org 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Hmm. On the one hand very much no, in the sense that I am a scientist, and I believe in the scientific method, and I think society should deal with facts and evidence when agreeing how to manage itself.

But on the other hand, individually, I am a creature of emotion and I feel connected to the universe, and I believe everything ebbs and flows in connection with everything else.

I don't feel the need for my scientist brain to hold that emotional part of myself to account or ransom, though. I don't need to know how it works or why it might be because it just is what it is.

[–] Josiane@beehaw.org 1 points 2 years ago (4 children)

But don’t you think that not everything can be proven and tested? And that science most likely doesn’t have it all figured out?

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[–] pushka@beehaw.org 1 points 2 years ago

I grew up as a Seventh-day Adventist, but lost my faith and left the church/religion in 2012 (was born in 1989)

[–] alanine96@beehaw.org 1 points 2 years ago

No, but I used to be far more derisive of religion than I am now. My wife is Christian and speaks about how she finds God in the woods, the lakes, and the natural world around her, and I have come to view God less as a specific person or all-knowing entity and more as an embodied collection of feelings and thoughts that people have regarding justice, truth, and love. This helps me reconcile many kinds of spiritual beliefs with my own understanding of the universe as garnered by mathematical processes and the Earth as it is shaped by human hands.

[–] Cinereus@beehaw.org 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Yep! I grew up nominally christian but actually pretty personally areligious, even with a long atheist phase, but in a pretty diverse religious upbringing both family and community-wise - mostly a mix of Unitarian Univeralism, Catholicism, and Judaism. I had a lot of anger at religion as a queer teenager from the US south but thankfully ended up falling in with more positive ex-Christian interfaith groups and not the antitheist community, which led to a lot of open exploring down many different religious paths just to better understand and see what the fuss was all about, to where I am now, an animist polytheist with a pretty solitary practice. No pressure, just me and my own relationship with the world and the many kinds of persons, human and not, who inhabit it.

[–] Butterbee@beehaw.org 1 points 2 years ago

I am, very much, not religious. My father is Catholic, my mother doesn't go into her spirituality but it's not Christian. So I was taught about different things and given the choice to believe in what makes sense to me. If there's one way to describe what feels to me like what I imagine faith to be like to someone who's religious it would be the messages of hope and of passion for discovery and learning that Carl Sagan showed. The Pale Blue Dot speech is a sermon. It inspires me to be a better person and to try and be the change in the world that I want to see. But ultimately science doesn't know everything and at some point even with it you must make assumptions and have "faith" in the process.

As far as divinity goes, I've always struggled to believe. I just don't see the extraordinary evidence that would be required for me to say "Oh, that makes a divinity-free universe impossible". And by the same token it is impossible to prove that the universe was not crafted by some all powerful being last Thursday with all our billions of years of history baked in for us to pour through. So I figure, I'll find out on my last day and until then I'll just focus on being as good a person as I can be.

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