noodling on religion again

[iimpavid]

 Shit sucks, generally, and thinking about religion makes me feel less bad about it, so I'm gonna do that here.

Several months ago, on another site someone (I think jokingly) proposed that any religious belief is, at it's core, an expression of a desire for discipline. I believe that this is incorrect but I can see how someone from a dominantly Christian society, whose exposure to religious expression looks like people who are insincerely performative and/or malicious. While I doubt that some people do get structure/discipline from their religious practice, I would argue instead that religious pursuit is not rooted in a desire for discipline. Rather, discipline is one of the mechanism one uses in practicing faith to reach other faith-based goals. 

I think that reducing religiosity to "people just want discipline/structure" is ... condescending. It seems to intentionally dismiss the myriad reasons people might worship any deity. While I think that the popular narrative is that "religion helps people explain the inexplicable" or "religion gives people a hierarchy to obey" I don't believe that this is the case across the board or even for the majority of us.

As a personal example: I experience profound alienation. This is, I think, from years of comparing notes with others, an autistic thing. There is a very short list of things that alleviate this feeling of alienation: others sincerely getting something out of my writing, making music with others, being a part of a crowd at a musical performance, and my gods. And I do mean that specifically. Worship of other gods either is neutral (as I have discovered at Wiccan and Kemetic ritual spaces), or actively makes the alienation and otherness worse (as I have always experienced in monotheistic temples during worship; but interestingly those spaces become neutral-to-peaceful when worship is not taking place).

So, one of my primary motivators for pursuing religion is the intense and constant craving I have to connect to others. I can only describe it in terms of body horror or cosmic horror, sometimes, that longing. It's a bone-deep, constant cold. The acts associated with worship: maintaining altars, praying, making devotional art, meditating, spending time in nature, blogging about religious junk in a way that is useful to others, doing useful service for my community in the name of my gods, teaching others about my faith's philosophies and stories-- all of it makes me feel less cut off from the world.

Doing all of that shit with any kind of consistency is hard. So, I try to cultivate discipline about some things: my meditation practice, actively writing about the gods even if it's just... noodles, cleaning my ancestor and deity altars so that they are not careless accumulations of objects. This discipline builds a sort of muscle memory so that I can more easily feel that sense of connection. Not everyone needs discipline to get the same results, but that's how it works for me. 

Audience participation section: what motivates your pursuit of faith/religion? (I'm not interested in atheistic answers to this question for obvious reasons.) 

Comments

[hashiveinu]

Like you, I'd say what motivates me is connection. But, unlike you, I am not led to that connection by pursuing polytheism. Polytheism is alienating to me.

I'm an animist, not in the sense of positing gods/spirits as separate beings that inhabit places or things, but in the sense that I think everything, every complex system (in the sense of systems theory) is "alive"/has selfhood. I don't really believe in supernatural explanations for the phenomena of emergent behavior in complex systems, but I don't have to to experience wonder and connection. I was drawn to practicing Judaism because it's one of my ethnic heritages, and you don't have to believe in God to practice it, and I was pretty traumatized by Christianity so that language turned me off at first... but I'm okay with it now. It follows from the rest of my belief system that the universe, as the complex system that contains all the rest, would have its own spirit/selfhood/whatever you want to call it, and I'm okay with calling that God.

I also think that religion/spirituality fulfills a need that a lot of people have that there currently culturally isn't much room for. I think fandom and RPing and similar things are other spaces that fulfill some of that need. I don't have a short summary of what that is; the long version is it has to do with evocativeness, symbol systems, connection with the subconscious, and using stories and characters and shared language as a way to communicate that way with oneself and others. There is precious little space in Western culture for that kind of thing, and I think that is utterly toxic.

That's a lot of clunky words to express something I find beautiful and ineffable. I don't know how to express it in a way that isn't clunky.

[iimpavid]

It's okay that it's clunky; I don't think you can really get into the nature of faith without reaching a point where language starts to fall short. I feel clunky trying to talk about it, too.

I agree, too, that the lack of space for the sacred-- whether explicitly part of a religious system or not-- is sorely lacking in Western cultures. It's incredibly unhealthy.

So often I see what I interpret as that religious/faithful/awe-full impulse steered toward people or corporate brands and I think it does a lot of harm. I think that the fundamental need humans have for wonder is based on reciprocity of some kind. A single person *can't* give back so much of themself; neither can a brand. But a person can find a great deal of wonder (or any other thing about faith that might nourish us) in the function of an atom, the development of mountains, their chosen deity/ies, storytelling, working to build their community. These are all closer to the infinite. A person won't as likely burn some stranger out or starve themself by seeking fulfillment, connection, understanding, wonder, whatever in these things. Or, at least, it's a little bit harder.

Put a different way, I see the pseudo-religious reverence of intellectual properties, individual people, political ideas and so on as being like... trying to eat while skipping half the digestive system. It causes malnourishment of the soul (or whatever term for a person's essential animating self you prefer). One can survive that way but it isn't really the best for them. Whereas sincerely directing that religious impulse toward things that are bigger than us (acts of creation, nature, the divine, science, art, philosophy, etc.) actually gives us the essential nutrients we need to be whole.

[hashiveinu]

Put a different way, I see the pseudo-religious reverence of intellectual properties, individual people, political ideas and so on as being like... trying to eat while skipping half the digestive system. It causes malnourishment of the soul (or whatever term for a person's essential animating self you prefer).

I really like that analogy.

[iimpavid]

Thank you :)