DrZoidberg
Contributor
Warning, heavy on metaphor... you know... just like God is.
I grew up in Sweden, an atheistic society. While I had heard the concept of God growing up, I'd never had it explained to me by anybody who actually believed in God. It's a bit like a person who doesn't care about sports explaining the rules of football. While possible accurate, there's just no way they can capture the motivation behind why anybody would be interested. So the life of Jesus always came across as if an explorer describing weird rituals made by some remote tribe in some jungle somewhere. To me, the pope was nothing but a bearer of a funny hat.
This type of society is sometimes referred to as post-atheist. In order to be an atheist you need to, at some point, have made a decision not to believe in a specific type of God. In order to make that decision it needs to be presented in such a way as that this is viable option. Menu items I can't afford, I'm just going to skip. I'm not going to waste time wondering how they might taste.
That's why I've stopped identifying as an atheist. I still do, when I'm here. But out in the real world, being an atheist is not part of how I see myself. At no point in my life did I reject religion. I've rejected religion in the same way I rejected to ride a zeppelin to work. It was never a viable option.
If this is a sliding scale, it looks like this:
theism---------agnosticism----------atheism---------------post-atheism
I'm way off the deep end.
When people ask me if I believe in God or I'm an atheist, I tell them I'm "nothing". Because it's accurate. In this society the words "theist" and "atheist" have stopped carrying meaning. If somebody here tells me they believe in God, that evokes zero associations to me, other than that they must be foreigners. I don't know the difference in behaviour between an atheist or theist. I don't really know how their beliefs differ. Not really. I don't know if their values are different.
I came to this realisation when I was at a spiritual retreat of sorts and we were using woo language. We were talking about God... or rather god. We all wanted to show respect for our host and each other so we refrained from saying we didn't believe in the mumbo jumbo. But it wasn't until afterwards we all realised that we were all atheists. Most of us were engineers, scientists, a mathematician, a venture capitalist... all upper middle class people.
In the rituals, we had no problem to slide back and forwards between our "atheism" and "theism". Because the word god could never be anything but a metaphor for us. It turned out that even the team of teachers were all atheists. The people who had been using all the spiritual language to begin with.
I live in a society where God is dead. The society that Nietzsche described. Not only dead, but has been dead for generations. Nobody has even a grandmother to explain what this nebulous God concept means to them. So it's elevated to a symbolic tool. Which I suspect was what it was initially. It just got a bit out of control.
Thoughts?
I grew up in Sweden, an atheistic society. While I had heard the concept of God growing up, I'd never had it explained to me by anybody who actually believed in God. It's a bit like a person who doesn't care about sports explaining the rules of football. While possible accurate, there's just no way they can capture the motivation behind why anybody would be interested. So the life of Jesus always came across as if an explorer describing weird rituals made by some remote tribe in some jungle somewhere. To me, the pope was nothing but a bearer of a funny hat.
This type of society is sometimes referred to as post-atheist. In order to be an atheist you need to, at some point, have made a decision not to believe in a specific type of God. In order to make that decision it needs to be presented in such a way as that this is viable option. Menu items I can't afford, I'm just going to skip. I'm not going to waste time wondering how they might taste.
That's why I've stopped identifying as an atheist. I still do, when I'm here. But out in the real world, being an atheist is not part of how I see myself. At no point in my life did I reject religion. I've rejected religion in the same way I rejected to ride a zeppelin to work. It was never a viable option.
If this is a sliding scale, it looks like this:
theism---------agnosticism----------atheism---------------post-atheism
I'm way off the deep end.
When people ask me if I believe in God or I'm an atheist, I tell them I'm "nothing". Because it's accurate. In this society the words "theist" and "atheist" have stopped carrying meaning. If somebody here tells me they believe in God, that evokes zero associations to me, other than that they must be foreigners. I don't know the difference in behaviour between an atheist or theist. I don't really know how their beliefs differ. Not really. I don't know if their values are different.
I came to this realisation when I was at a spiritual retreat of sorts and we were using woo language. We were talking about God... or rather god. We all wanted to show respect for our host and each other so we refrained from saying we didn't believe in the mumbo jumbo. But it wasn't until afterwards we all realised that we were all atheists. Most of us were engineers, scientists, a mathematician, a venture capitalist... all upper middle class people.
In the rituals, we had no problem to slide back and forwards between our "atheism" and "theism". Because the word god could never be anything but a metaphor for us. It turned out that even the team of teachers were all atheists. The people who had been using all the spiritual language to begin with.
I live in a society where God is dead. The society that Nietzsche described. Not only dead, but has been dead for generations. Nobody has even a grandmother to explain what this nebulous God concept means to them. So it's elevated to a symbolic tool. Which I suspect was what it was initially. It just got a bit out of control.
Thoughts?