When I stopped identifying as agnostic, there were a few years where I wanted *something* about religion in some sense to be... I don't know, if not true-true, still true in some other important sense, but... the more I looked at it, the less was really there, and the more I felt frustrated at the whole enterprise and the more convinced I became that on some level, people just *had* to know that they were kidding themselves if they cared about what was and what wasn't.
I don't know if that's exactly fair, since... I just don't do the faith thing, never could - if it can't be detected in any way, it just wasn't real, and there's something really, really weird about a God who used to do miracles and make people sacrifice goats, but these days he just wants you to wear hot itchy clothes on Sunday and meditate on how great it is to be the white middle class before each meal. I guess I've had some convictions I've had to take back later, so maybe I know a little about that.
But... it's not really all that often that I step back and even try to remember a fragment of what it was like to sort of want something to be salvageable from the general realm of religion. But... I don't expect to salvage anything for myself, not anymore.
I don't know what this means practically. I didn't grow up thinking that "discovering truth" or whatever would mean learning the null hypothesis and unlearning everything that isn't real that people would rather believe in. I thought that the truth was some golden epiphany, some magic puzzle piece that would be so brilliant and perfect that everyone would want as soon as they saw it. I must've heard too many sermons and saw too many ridiculous movies with stupid-happy endings growing up.
But I haven't really figured out what totally not assigning any merit to any metaphysical theory really means other than that I'm kind of morbidly curious what people believe about stuff, but in a way that I know I'd probably feel isolated and a little disgusted more often than not. I don't have anything that people want. Nothing I'll ever "learn" about "the big questions" will ever make anyone the least bit happy, and there's nothing I can do about that, not even apologize.
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chiming
Cross-posted from Facebook, maybe with edits
Date: 2010-09-02 02:51 am (UTC)From:When I stopped identifying as agnostic, there were a few years where I wanted *something* about religion in some sense to be... I don't know, if not true-true, still true in some other important sense, but... the more I looked at it, the less was really there, and the more I felt frustrated at the whole enterprise and the more convinced I became that on some level, people just *had* to know that they were kidding themselves if they cared about what was and what wasn't.
I don't know if that's exactly fair, since... I just don't do the faith thing, never could - if it can't be detected in any way, it just wasn't real, and there's something really, really weird about a God who used to do miracles and make people sacrifice goats, but these days he just wants you to wear hot itchy clothes on Sunday and meditate on how great it is to be the white middle class before each meal. I guess I've had some convictions I've had to take back later, so maybe I know a little about that.
But... it's not really all that often that I step back and even try to remember a fragment of what it was like to sort of want something to be salvageable from the general realm of religion. But... I don't expect to salvage anything for myself, not anymore.
I don't know what this means practically. I didn't grow up thinking that "discovering truth" or whatever would mean learning the null hypothesis and unlearning everything that isn't real that people would rather believe in. I thought that the truth was some golden epiphany, some magic puzzle piece that would be so brilliant and perfect that everyone would want as soon as they saw it. I must've heard too many sermons and saw too many ridiculous movies with stupid-happy endings growing up.
But I haven't really figured out what totally not assigning any merit to any metaphysical theory really means other than that I'm kind of morbidly curious what people believe about stuff, but in a way that I know I'd probably feel isolated and a little disgusted more often than not. I don't have anything that people want. Nothing I'll ever "learn" about "the big questions" will ever make anyone the least bit happy, and there's nothing I can do about that, not even apologize.