noodling on religion again
Nov. 22nd, 2022 03:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.)
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.)
