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0 pointsumvi6y ago0 comments

Oh, I know. I am religious, but I do not agree with all religions. I think some are better than others and even think some religious organizations are evil (like Scientology).

But, I feel religion has given me enormous benefits in life - it's helped me focus less on myself, it's given me a profound sense of identity and purpose in life. I don't feel that it has hindered my career or love of learning/science/engineering at all. I think it could help a lot of people who struggle with lack of sense of purpose/identity/community, etc. So I don't like it when all religion is condemned because of bad actors in some religions.

To use an imperfect analogy, I don't like it when people use logic like this: "All projects on GitHub are bad. Look at all these poorly written packages: X, Y, Z. Look at all these bigoted project maintainers. Did you know X project was a front for human trafficking? There is no reason for me to explore and contribute to projects on GitHub when there are so many compelling reasons to the contrary."

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socks6y ago

Having grown up religious, I used to think this way.

In my family, I now see people coming up against real hardship, and because their purpose in life is so deeply rooted in religion, they don't know how to cope with things emotionally (instead, trying to defer the emotional toll of those things, believing that their god will handle it)... and they make strange decisions, things go horribly, they are left struggling to comprehend. They live as if they are on a rollercoaster of hope, anticipation, crisis, disappointment, recovery, hope.

In my own experience, having your self worth and sense of identity attached to religion is a fragile existence, especially if you are logically inclined.

umviOP6y ago

> In my own experience, having your self worth and sense of identity attached to religion is a fragile existence, especially if you are logically inclined.

I admit, this can be a problem. But it doesn't have to be that way. You can be logically inclined and attach at least part of your identity to religion. Having part my identity attached to religion gives me a sense of purpose. I know that life isn't meaningless and that God expects me to do certain things if I want to maximum happiness for myself and the people I love.

On the other side of the coin, I have a lot of atheist friends who struggle with nihilism which has often led to other equally strange decisions, despite them being "logically inclined" (like dabbling in drugs) to try to cope with their sense of purposelessness. I had one friend (brilliant programmer) who basically fried his brain using LSD trying to find purpose in life. He is a completely different person than he was before, and not in a good way. Some friends have even had prolonged periods of depression because of it.

username906y ago

I haven't seen that, but maybe it is because religion is almost dead where I grew up so mostly strange outcasts were religious.

tasuki6y ago

It appears to me you believe in belief. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Belief_in_belief

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