C/D: "I'm not religious but I am spiritual."

Dud. Meaningless. Vapid. Empty. Probably believes in Astrology.

heh does anyone really say this anymore? its an eyeroller for sure

v 90s

C:D: strawmen

dude you've already got the Dawkins thread for proving you're smarter than the god-botherers, are you on a mission or something?

people say this

people like my mom

she does believe in astrology too

most dud thing ever.

i'd 100% of the time prefer "i'm not spiritual but i'm religious"

this is the 'everything but country and rap' of religion

wait we had this thread right?

I'm not spiritual but I am sexy

People definitely still say this, always makes my skin crawl a bit.

"i'm not religious but i am opinionated"

xxp few dozen times iirc

Wait, wtf is dud about this? You're not allowed to have a sense of spirituality without being connected to some kind of organized religion?

"I'm a deeply spiritual person"?

If the most vociferous Christians weren't insufferable fun-hating busybodies, this phrase would be unnecessary. So I blame them.

C:D: strawmen

― american thinker (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, 12 May 2011 19:34 (3 minutes ago)

This is not a strawman, "God is everything, maaaan"-dude, we've all heard people say this.

is this like when non-Christians say they believe in "free will"

"i'm not philosophical but i am a sophist"

Dud - but only because I highly doubt those people actually look for spiritual explanations/experiences they just want to sound open-minded.

You ever hear girls say that? "I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual." I like to reply with "I'm not honest, but you're interesting!"--Daniel Tosh

This is not a strawman, "God is everything, maaaan"-dude, we've all heard people say this.

keep digging

"i'm not a rationalist but i have got a rash"

If the most vociferous Christians weren't insufferable fun-hating busybodies, this phrase would be unnecessary. So I blame them.

I don't think that has anything to do with it. I mean you can believe in god or something without being a Christian. You can have some vague spiritual beliefs without being devout about them. In which case you would be "spiritual" but not religious.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzvZmQaJo68

"I'm not a positivist but I'm not very negative, either..."

ILX Religiosity and Spirituality and Agnosticity and Atheicity Poll

This reminds me of an old Frank Kogan line--something about the age-old debate between Free Willy and Determinismy.

"i'm not a racist but"
About 1,150,000 results (0.29 seconds)

"i'm not philosophical but i am a sophist"

― wanking on the moon (Noodle Vague), Thursday, May 12, 2011 7:40 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

<3

"call me old-fashioned, but..."

I used to think
I had the answers to everything,
But now I know
Life doesn't always go my way, yeah...
Feels like I'm caught in the middle
That's when I realize...

[Chorus:]
I'm not a girl,
Not yet a woman.
All I need is time,
A moment that is mine,
While I'm in between.

[Verse 2]
I'm not a girl,
There is no need to protect me.
It's time that I
Learn to face up to this on my own.
I've seen so much more than you know now,
So don't tell me to shut my eyes.

[Chorus]

I'm not a girl,
But if you look at me closely,
You will see it my eyes.
This girl will always find
Her way.

I'm not a girl
(I'm not a girl don't tell me what to believe).
Not Yet a woman
(I'm just trying to find the woman in me, yeah).
All I need is time (All I need),
A moment that is mine (That is mine),
While I'm in between.

I'm not a girl
Not yet a woman
All I need is time (All I need),
A moment that is mine,
While I'm in between.

I'm not a girl,
Not yet a woman.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dajn9Bk24CY&feature=related

i believe in astrology

astrologomy

can't decide whether to SB u for the astrology or the display name

http://www.birdsasart.com/rootjpegs/AtlanticPuffin4.jpg

Anyway, here is a puffin. He looks like he might be kinda spiritual but i doubt he has a fully developed cosmology.

wth?

I'm not spiritual but I am religious!
~~Pharisee 4 Lyfe~~

puffin looks more "soulful" imo

http://www.fairislebirdobs.co.uk/images/Puffin.jpg

contemplating the demiurge, urlier today

guys how does meaning work, im worried i might be vapid

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01318/bittern_1318554c.jpg

Bitterns, on the other hand, are predominantly agnostic.

http://thumbsforhire.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/dancing-blue-footed-booby.jpg

The Blue-footed Booby practises a variant of Sufism.

guys how does meaning work, im worried i might be vapid

― ogmor, Thursday, May 12, 2011 7:49 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

board descrip plz

Wait, wtf is dud about this? You're not allowed to have a sense of spirituality without being connected to some kind of organized religion?

― geir was right (wk), Thursday, May 12, 2011 3:39 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark

its just a cliche & its easy 2 react cynically when someone says it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ORCnvGnaAM

http://www.realbirder.com/NorthEast%20England/Shag3.JPG

I don't like seabirds much, but I do like a nice shag.

I don't think that has anything to do with it. I mean you can believe in god or something without being a Christian.

Strictly speaking, of course you can. But where I live, annoying Christians have so poisoned the adjective "religious" that additional clauses are required lest folks get the wrong idea.

The only moving thing
http://thumbnails27.imagebam.com/13197/e9fc6f131966534.jpg

http://joelws.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/cnn-spiritual-but-not-religious-300x216.jpg

CNN weighs in:

http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/personal/06/03/spiritual.but.not.religious/index.html?hpt=C2

its just a cliche & its easy 2 react cynically when someone says it

Yeah, I get that. I just seems like an accurate description of the majority of people I know. I know very few people who go to church, apart from a couple of relatives. And yet I only know a few people that consider themselves atheists. So everyone else is basically "spiritual but not religious" right?

But it would definitely be an annoying thing to say unprompted.

like just blurting out on the bus?

no, in that context it's fine

You get the 'spiritual' thing in fashion quite a bit - and it annoys me when I know damned well the person is basically agnostic and does a bit of yoga.

lol but I feel like that would describe more people who would use this term.

Good thread. I like the Puffins.

Ever asked someone who says this what they mean by "spiritual?" The response is usually:

"I just believe there's something else, something we can't see."

Ok.

it's called gravity

"there's something else, something we can't see" was basically your definition of god on that other thread Shakey, wasn't it?

no. you guys really need to brush up on your reading comprehension.

Ever asked someone who says this what they mean by "spiritual?" The response is usually:

"I just believe there's something else, something we can't see."

Ok.

That bothers me far less than the people who believe in something that's equally kooky and poorly though out, but very specific. The wishy-washy-ness masks an uncertainty which could lead to further doubt.

no. you guys really need to brush up on your reading comprehension.

still trying to figure out how gravity is something we can't see

fwiw, I did not offer a personal definition, I pointed out several different ways that the concept of God has been elucidated in various theological traditions.

xp

still trying to figure out how gravity is something we can't see

lol. you see the EFFECTS of gravity. you don't SEE gravity itself. gravity does not reflect light.

science brigade really bringing it today... *sigh*

gravity is a force, it doesn't have mass, etc.

keep fightin off them hordes, shakes

why do I bother

lol "science brigade." You know, being an atheist doesn't necessarily mean you know shit about science.

but you have a very narrow definition of "see"

you mean... the definition used by science?

you see the EFFECTS of gravity. you don't SEE gravity itself. gravity does not reflect light.

so gravity = god and the effects = the prophet?

I mean come the fuck on here. this is physics 101. What you can see is the spectrum of light reflected off material objects. Gravity is not a material object.

I wasn't even trying to make an analogy here, I was just making a loljoke about "unseen" things at work in the universe

being an atheist doesn't necessarily mean you know shit about science.

also lol @ atheists believing in things they don't understand. sounds familiar.

I know, but I was just fucking with you because you were loling at something that to me sounded identical to what you were claiming was the common monotheistic concept of god yesterday. And it also struck me as being pretty funny since gravity is something that we can in fact observe and measure while god is not.

((i was making the point that the successfully trolling 'science brigade' you're so valiantly defending us against, but you know, have fun))

and wtf does "believing in things" have to do with anything?

"I'm not really scientific but I am an atheist."

"probably believes in orgone"

I'm not a bigot, I hate god and science equally.

What about Dorkus Maximus: the God of Science?

And it also struck me as being pretty funny since gravity is something that we can in fact observe and measure while god is not.

― geir was right (wk), Thursday, May 12, 2011 3:01 PM (19 minutes ago) Bookmark

really? we can measure gravity but not god? fire up the presses!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3eTsNEgmL8

God is 3'!

^^^divine revelation

"I'm physical but I'm not a physicist"

mormons know whats up

u r either pure raw dog materialist or "spiritual" no middle ground & i think most ppl are a bit uncomfortable abt accepting that kind of determinism, or things like "love is purely material phenomenon" and i dont blame it is sort of weird

ime "I am spiritual"="I like sunsets and have a dreamcatcher in my car"

some awesome spacemen 3 style wallpaper in that kids in the hall clip!

Everything abt that Kids clip is awesome! Esp. Mark sticking out his smug lil tongue.

i'm not racist but...

Somebody gave me a dreamcatcher a couple of years ago. We're not friends any more.

ime "I am spiritual"="I like sunsets and have a dreamcatcher in my car"

tbph, i get a little bummed by the knee-jerk sneering at this kind of straw-man spirituality. it's so easy, like lolling at dave matthews fans in their tevas and shit. i mean, the english language isn't really all that well-equipped to express these sorts of thoughts, hence dumb oppositions like "spiritual vs. religious."

how are we supposed to talk about our sense of things that seem to exist outside the material world?

u r either pure raw dog materialist or "spiritual" no middle ground & i think most ppl are a bit uncomfortable abt accepting that kind of determinism, or things like "love is purely material phenomenon" and i dont blame it is sort of weird

― flopson, Thursday, May 12, 2011 3:33 PM (39 minutes ago) Bookmark

disagree. i can't speak for most people, but i'm a "pure raw dog materialist," comfortable with the deterministic implications. i'm also open to and interested in what you might call "other things." there's no conflict there, imo.

not sure ugi

ime "I am spiritual"="I like sunsets and have a dreamcatcher in my car"

Yeah, no. Not to me.

Also, what contenderizer said.

tbph, i get a little bummed by the knee-jerk sneering at this kind of straw-man spirituality. it's so easy, like lolling at dave matthews fans in their tevas and shit. i mean, the english language isn't really all that well-equipped to express these sorts of thoughts, hence dumb oppositions like "spiritual vs. religious."

I agree with you, although I don't think spiritual vs. religious is a dumb opposition. I think it's dumb that people try to ignore that difference and file all spiritual thought under the heading of religion. For example I don't think it makes much sense to think of Shinto as a religion in the western sense. And I understand the "lol dreamcatchers" impulse but it also seems not that far removed from the desire to make everything conform to a western conception of religion. How do you differentiate between "lol, stupid shit is stupid" or "lol, metaphysical shit is stupid" or "lol, you're going to hell because you haven't accepted Jesus Christ as your lord and savior"?

sense of thigns that seem to exist outside the physical world

u definitely r not a member of raw dog pure materialist club sorry

I get where yr coming from flopson, like, even "love" is just chemicals in the brain, all that kind of thing.

Fucking depressing if u ask me.

not sure ugi

― flopson, Thursday, May 12, 2011 4:28 PM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark

no, dude, i get it. i just enjoy the dissonance.

i'm experiencing some dissonance right now. Didn't we just do this thread?

yes! it is still giving!

http://www.gilroydispatch.com/content/img/f274209/the-giving-tree.jpg

kid 1, tree 0

i always thought that to be charitable to these people, you would just recognize that they probably think something like, 'i have religious feelings that are not just nothing, but every recognized religious institution / practice / doctrine i have encountered is disappointing or repellent or useless to me'.

I get where yr coming from flopson, like, even "love" is just chemicals in the brain, all that kind of thing.

Fucking depressing if u ask me.

― The man who mistook his life for a FAP (Trayce), Friday, May 13, 2011 12:55 AM (12 minutes ago)

scotch is just chemicals in a glass, it's still fun and delicious.

It's ALL one big thread man.

yeah, i'm still hoping to fall in scotch with the right girl

i don't generally believe in image-bombing threads but i wouldn't be terribly sad if that was this thread's fate

http://creativekidsplay.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/shel-silverstein.jpg

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_K9WGsmT6Sbw/SgryPFohiQI/AAAAAAAAA-8/IclD9xrSlbc/s400/ShelSilverstein_Playboy.jpg

if i had to choose between the ppl i've known who say stuff like this and the ppl i've known who've been smug hardcore rationalist/atheist types, the former every time. that said the word 'spiritual' is pretty grating.

believing in astrology is no more absurd than following any particular religion.

I think you're talking about nice people versus smug people, which is a different issue entirely

"how are we supposed to talk about our sense of things that seem to exist outside the material world?"

See, this is where I get into major IDGI territory? In what way do these things "seem to exist outside the material world?" We live in the physical world. We apprehend it with our senses, which can only perceive a limited range of inputs. As Shakey point out, we can't even see gravity, only what it does to things. So how would one determine one was apprehending something that exists "outside the material world?" Are you perceiving it with an imaginary sense organ?

My brain chemicals tell me it is so

xp

in the same way, even in a strictly determinist universe people wd be all "i believe in free will" cos that's the way their atoms made them

I'm asking seriously even if it doesn't come out that way btw.

I guess the real question is "By what criteria would one determine that something exists, but doesn't exist 'in the physical world'?"

you can be a strict materialist and still believe in unseen powerful forces that shape life

you would have to believe they were ultimately measurable or observable tho

do i have to post a marx.jpg?

Marx thought that stuff was observable and measurable

and at points where he didn't, he wasn't being a materialist

ideas and systems thereof are 'measurable' but you kind of have to count history and philosophy as 'sciences' that do the measuring

xp well yeah

i don't think everything material can only be studied by science? if you're thinking about ideology then i'm with Deleuze & Guattari, it's kind of a random bubble of mistaken thinking

Professor Jennings to thread.

http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSQHh2lQtIJojcnjrQ1MAyxEHbbYGg0mhfhHjCgv3NWMZNbvoU0

guys the universe is made of information, matter and motion are just epiphenomenal

/ontological challops

this reminds me of a quote from cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster: "If I don’t see I am blind, I am blind; but if I see I am blind, I see”

point being, paradoxically, that we can see that there are things we cannot see. for someone like von Foerster, being able to see something means NOT being able to see something else, but we can acknowledge that fact.

"if i had to choose between the ppl i've known who say stuff like this and the ppl i've known who've been smug hardcore rationalist/atheist types"

the only dude I know who is full-on smug hardcore rationalist/atheist -- his mom is into falun gong and he's into hippy-dippy alt. healing. so sometimes they are the same people!

i'd 100% of the time prefer "i'm not spiritual but i'm religious"

― Mordy, Thursday, May 12, 2011 2:36 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

lol yes

basically if you are bothered by "I'm not religious but I'm spiritual" it's a sign you are uptight and probably need more fiber in your diet imo

like, of all the shit to get wound up about if you're even a day over 20

well, there's a natural impulse to hate on fair weather fans.
isn't that why dante reserves the shittiest circle of hell for fencesitters and pomplamouse?

dunno where that meme got started, dante clearly didn't do that

those who didn't choose don't even have the dignity of being in hell-proper! the implication is kind of that they don't even know where they are but they are damned

he probably would have thrown out a few grim lines about nataly dawn tho

I remember Revelation 3:16, with its penetrating commentary on dreamcatchers.

its penetrating commentary on blowjobs

OTM

So how would one determine one was apprehending something that exists "outside the material world?" Are you perceiving it with an imaginary sense organ?

― Captain Hyrax (Phil D.), Friday, May 13, 2011 8:15 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

okay, this probably won't make sense to anybody, but i'll give it a shot.

let's say you're a "pure raw dog materialist," as flopson says. you are a physical being in a physical world using only your physical sense organs to apprehend your surroundings. you don't believe in anything, period, but you do your best to make sense of the information you've got.

and let's say that, without sacrificing any of that, you decide to experiment with "believing in," specifically with believing in something spiritual, metaphysical and transcendental. your core beliefs don't change, but your relationship to the idea of belief does. and let's say you get something out of this exercise, something that doesn't seem to be available otherwise. you find that the more completely you invest in this belief that you don't really believe, the better it works, and, in some way, the more you DO believe it (or, at least, believe in it, not a hairsplitting distinction).

eventually, you reach a point where you're wholly invested in both belief systems. and since one is material, the other spiritual, one predicated on "realness", the other not, they don't conflict with one another in any meaningful way. i say i'm an atheist, because practically speaking, i am. on a material level, i still believe in nothing but that material reality IS. my belief system is an internal phenomena. otoh, also have to admit that i'm a believer, because to do otherwise would dishonor the tenets of the belief system i've manufactured (says the materialist) / accepted (says the devotee).

Are you perceiving it with an imaginary sense organ?

short answer: yes, sort of...

More like you're using this belief as a mental model for your interactions with the world. In other words, your behavior and outlook are guided by it, and your personality and interactions with other are shaped.

So it's basically a model of a way to think, not something that's perceived, per se. The world doesn't change, but your perception of it does.

http://www.tvrecapsreviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/jefftroypiercepsycologylettinggo.jpg

ultimately prob the biggest rl effect being a materialist/~spiritual~ist is whether or not u say things like "im not religoius but i am spiritual" & how u react to ppl who do say it

http://www.yourfunnystuff.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/snake-eats-itself.jpg

maybe im just saying that cause im not into spirituality & imagine when ppl vibe out to their spirituality its p similar to me when im coolin thinking abt life

just w/ chinese characters

lol

I've recommended this book a few times on ILX, but I think pretty much everyone here would love it:

http://www.amazon.com/Ghosts-Futures-Past-Spiritualism-Nineteenth-Century/dp/0520252608

It's about Spiritualism as an American discourse and I think it gets to what bugs ppl about "I'm spiritual but not religious" which isn't this other discussion about 'feeling something sublime but not being associated with an institution' but rather this other thing that is an American heritage of locating magic + the occult in a secular discourse. And I think it's that sloppiness (ie believing in astrology but not believing in god) that is annoying. If you're going to believe in weird shit, at least locate it in this huge historical context of weird shit and the esoteric + the sublime and the holy. Like the stuff William James was writing about -- ecstasy, conversion, etc -- humans have been working thru since we've been humans. It's this talking to the dead through the static in your stereo system and reading your horoscope next to Dennis the Menace in the newspaper. It's weirdly secular and non-commital. I don't even mind astrology when it has some historical substance (there's a whole history of Italian astrology that's really fascinating, like Machiavelli creating this sprawling systems of astrology and politics) + maybe even throw in some ritual. But seeing a rainbow and cooing doesn't make you spiritual or really anything bc rainbows are cool to everyone but the kind of person who would coo at a rainbow and then decide that makes them spiritual is the kind of person who would say the thread title unironically and the kind of person that annoys me often.

tldr read the book tho it's awesome.

also dont think being a materialist nec implies that u have a massive boner 4 rigorously apply scientific analysis & skepticism to everything, its more an underlying concern, a feeling that u dont need there to be more to it, that spirituality is unnecessary bc w/o it all of life is still there. really cool article in this issue of nyrb abt the relationship bw human cognition & science that i feel relates http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/may/26/its-even-less-your-genes/

So it's basically a model of a way to think, not something that's perceived, per se. The world doesn't change, but your perception of it does.

― mh, Friday, May 13, 2011 12:26 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah, that's fair. the idea of a kind of metaphysical perception (or some such) is built into it, but its mechanisms are necessarily vague.

an American heritage of locating magic + the occult in a secular discourse.

afaik/afaic locating magic + the occult in a secular discourse is actually more widespread & common than institutionalized religion, worldwide!!

Mordy otm in so many ways as usual.

I still am irrationally pissed off at people who strongly identify with organized religion but profess a strong belief in the zodiac or horoscope garbage. I wanted to ask Nancy Reagan what Jesus thought about the horoscope specialist that was in her life.

I still am irrationally pissed off at people who strongly identify with organized religion but profess a strong belief in the zodiac or horoscope garbage.

I was like this when I was Catholic but now I view these people as possessing a more sophisticated spirituality than yr garden-variety doctrinaire

That's kind of angry youth/atheist/agnostic 101 that I'm professing here: Being angry at other people for being hypocrites for not following their professed beliefs strongly enough.

nancy r. was pro-stem cells. if marmaduke and horoscopes brought her to it, i say it is the destination not the journey.

I can't argue with you on that one.

Wanting people to be consistent on the area of their life most likely to be in flux due to the fact it's really the system they use to relate themselves as individuals to life is asking way too much.

If you're going to believe in weird shit, at least locate it in this huge historical context of weird shit and the esoteric + the sublime and the holy. ...It's this talking to the dead through the static in your stereo system and reading your horoscope next to Dennis the Menace in the newspaper. It's weirdly secular and non-commital.

i'm with areo, re this approach. don't see anything wrong with any of the above, but then i don't think that metaphysical beliefs are "better" or more valid when they're ratified by history, ritual, religion, etc. mostly i think people just like to sneer at one another, and differences in approach to faith/belief/spirituality provide a good hook for that.

which isn't to say the "i'm not religious, i'm spiritual" crowd aren't often annoying as fuck...

they're kind of like vegetarians that eat bacon, right?

perhaps the annoyance stems from the fact that saying "I'm spiritual" almost always seems to stop short of making yourself uncomfortable, asking hard questions, pursuing a better self, or taking tough ethical stands. it's all the warm fuzzies of religion without any of the labor.

don't know about you but i definitely want to make myself uncomfortable as much as possible since lyfe is so easy

alternately i tend to think of this statement as pretty much signifying something non-threatening...it's way to project an aura of tolerance into a religiously heterogenous culture. a way of getting along.

'doctrinaire' is an odd charge.

like, nobody likes someone who makes it their life's mission to ruin the lives of ppl who live contrary to some set of historically-delivered rules (maggie gallagher, i'm looking at you)

on the other hand, i have a funny kind of respect for the person who tells your kid, nope, sorry, your dog is not going to be in heaven with you, and then just kind of shrugs and says, those are the rules.

because, what do we know of "heaven" that is separable from the "rules" laid out in this or that text/tradition to get there?

as in, i doubt you'll find a person who is militantly "spiritual but not religious."

"paris is worth a mass"

because, what do we know of "heaven" that is separable from the "rules" laid out in this or that text/tradition to get there?

well, this is exactly where the really radical parts of various traditions get intense: the rules/texts as routes to places where rules & texts are revealed as the two-dimensional shells of something much grander. or:

20 Now when He was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, He answered them and said, “The kingdom of God does not come with observation; 21 nor will they say, ‘See here!’ or ‘See there!’ For indeed, the kingdom of God is within you.”
--Luke 17:21

And I think it's that sloppiness (ie believing in astrology but not believing in god) that is annoying. If you're going to believe in weird shit, at least locate it in this huge historical context of weird shit and the esoteric + the sublime and the holy.

That seems totally backwards to me though. If you experience weird shit, and it doesn't align with anything within that historical context, it stands to reason you're going to look for more contemporary explanations. And perhaps the weird shit people experience now is somehow different than it would have been in the past, since it's informed by the contemporary world. So people used to see angels, and then they saw phantom blimps, and now they see ufos. And maybe those ufos are in fact angels, but the people who see them don't make that conceptual jump. So it's more understandable that they would reach for the nearest explanation and become a follower of some ufo cult or whatever.

I mean personally, the idea of god and heaven and hell and all of that never really made any sense to me. But I've read horoscopes that seemed to have been custom written for me. And I understand rationally why that is, but if I didn't I could easily take up a belief in astrology.

otm - it's like saying "if you're going to keep your mind as open as possible, at least have a narrow mind"

I say this as a recovering hate-people-who-say-they're-spiritual-but-not-religious type dude, just fwiw

as in, i doubt you'll find a person who is militantly "spiritual but not religious."

Well here lies the main difference between the two concepts, which is partly linguistic. "Religious" can and often does mean "militancy" by itself. So you can watch your favorite TV show "religiously". "Spiritual" doesn't really have as many functions you can throw into everyday life.

I'm kind of recovering, too. I really think that it's the worst sort of pedantry to require people to have "solid, firmly-stated religious beliefs or gtfo"

I think really I initially was angry at this phrase in the thread title because it's too often followed by beliefs that I find offensive or dumb.

I'm a recovering "spiritual but not religious" so I guess I just see it as a potential stepping stone to atheism and not really a "get in step with your proper cultural heritage you loser" kind of thing.

I really think that it's the worst sort of pedantry to require people to have "solid, firmly-stated religious beliefs or gtfo"

Funniest thing is, the religious/spiritual experience is the one thing that should escape firmly-stated description. The religious/spiritual should be beyond man's comprehension; otherwise it might as well be science.

imo, spiritual just means that you have heavy thoughts/feelings and you know how to space out and think baout things
i don't have a single preconceived notion of what spiritual actually means because i've always accepted my opinion as truth and never bothered to hear other opinions on this matter

so there's no reason to roll my eyes at "I'm not religious but I am spiritual" other than it being a cliche

as in, i doubt you'll find a person who is militantly "spiritual but not religious."

― ryan, Friday, 13 May 2011 20:11 (1 hour ago)

Ever been to California?

I've lived in CA all my life, can't remember the last time anyone said this to me tbh

also you seem kinda tightly wound

maybe you should pray on it

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aokcupid.com+";spiritual+but+not+religious"

that didn't work well, but our url tag still hates quotes, so whatevs

2 dumb thoughts:

Is this predominantly a WASPy thing? For example if you're a 20-something in search of some kind of spirituality in your life, the rich and ancient traditions of the presbyterian church may not be such a strong draw. Which might explain the sort of cultural tourist aspect that accompanies dreamcatchers or whatever.

Also, is this a symptom of the mass media kind of dethroning religion? If someone my age believes in an afterlife, there's a good chance that belief is informed by Christianity. But there might be an equally good chance that it just comes from watching Ghostbusters and Poltergeist as a kid.

mass media kind of dethroning religion

lol what?

"we're bigger than jesus" etc. If you grew up in 1880, most of your formative cultural exposure to literature, music, etc. probably came from the church. If you grew up in 1980, you were sitting in front of the TV.

but most TV is informed by biblical text, e.g. seinfeld was a multi-season adaptation of trials of job

I have decided I am not religious nor spiritual but I am a mystic. Where does ILX stand on this? esp Mordy.

printing press -> gutenberg bible
television -> online ministry / the 700 Club

we've gone downhill, for sure

but most TV is informed by biblical text, e.g. seinfeld was a multi-season adaptation of trials of job

Sure but then who needs to go back to the source anymore? Might as well just celebrate festivus instead.

I have decided I am not religious nor spiritual but I am a mystic. Where does ILX stand on this? esp Mordy.

join Viceroy + me in awesome future potential mysticism/quaballah/gnostic thread!

I love the way people say they aren't into 'organised' religion - like they'd be totally cool with disorganised religion.

there are plenty of disorganized religions

the remaining pantheistic religions are pretty disorganized (hinduism, voodoo, condomble) for ex

A lot of the people who say that are totally into dabbling in that stuff!

"Mysticism" > Spirituality/Religion

but most TV is informed by biblical text

A lot of TV is misinterpreted just as the bible is. See "fan fiction".

i think hp lovecraft was otm wrt to "spirituality". the universe is a horrific, terrifying place, the sooner yr puny little brain flickers out the better.

i'm not spiritual but i am religious

done been done already. upthread

i'm not religious but i am transexual

(not really)

I'm not a soldier but I believe in an eternal soul.

I self-identified as an atheist for years and years, claimed I thought religious people were "insane at a basic level" even to friends who were religious, etc etc, but actually, these days, I'd say I was agnostic and, as long as it does no harm, each to their own. But I think a lot of religion can and does do harm. So can and does atheism and relativism.

I'm an atheist but I never engage anybody in a religious debate unless they confront me first, and even then I usually just state my piece and move on.

being an atheist doesn't = having to be a dick about it, or mean you have to give it much thought.

I'm not religious but the Iron Giant makes me cry. "Souls...don't die..." *sniff sniff*

I'm not religious but I eat at Chic-Fil-A

Used to be a hardcore atheist, but a love of history/archeology/anthropology lead me back to studying the Great Books and Tall Tales and eventually I kinda figured I like the idea of trying to experience and describe the incomprehensible. Eventually I realized at my core is this unexplainable feeling that reality is actually much bigger than just the universe that we are aware of and can measure.

So I'm currently one of those assholes that says "Do I believe in God? Depends on what you mean by 'God'." Roll Xavier Renegade Angel clip.

I always thought you were one of those 'u create ur own reality' new age bros.

LOL yeah kinda. I thing that stuff is basically true but in order for it to mean anything other than "If you are optimistic good things will happen" you have to have developed your concentration & mental control to a point unreachable by 99.99999% of humanity.

I remember some thread where you were arguing it p hardcore, like as hardcore as Jane Roberts or anyone else would, & I sort of wrote you off as a solipsist forever. Sorry!

Also you were posting about us reaching some cosmic turning point of consciousness revival on the politics thread – that was kinda cute tbh – not to sound patronizing – made me think of this novel which I like in spite of myself:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/5f/TheaAlexander_2150AD.jpg

LOL yeah kinda. I thing that stuff is basically true but in order for it to mean anything other than "If you are optimistic good things will happen" you have to have developed your concentration & mental control to a point unreachable by 99.99999% of humanity.

― Telephoneface (Adam Bruneau), Sunday, May 15, 2011 1:07 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark

Tell that to a poor kid in Bangladesh or India. Thinking you create your own reality is an extremely privileged mindset.

oh no what have I done ;_;

http://www.chattanoogafishingforum.com/forums/get-attachment.asp?action=view&attachmentid=16042

(don't worry there's hope at the bottom)

i used to be a hardcore li'l atheist until I took acid and read the Illuminatus! Trilogy, been a panshamanic metagnostic every since. basically universalism w/ a side of occult, all that mystical shit

Tell that to a poor kid in Bangladesh or India. Thinking you create your own reality is an extremely privileged mindset.

yeah those poor kids in Bangladesh or India would totally hate the Bhagavad-Gita and the Srimad Bhagavatam, I bet they spit when they see it

dunno how to break this to you but yr message board postings on this subject help the poor even less than the comforts of religion

like srsly how can you be so woefully fucking ignorant as to say "Thinking you create your own reality is an extremely privileged mindset" - do you actually know nothing whatsoever of Buddhism and Hinduism - imagining that ideas which came to be embraced by privileged westerners are therefore the invention & property of those privileged westerners is itself an expression of the most privileged mindset that can be imagined

Tell that to a poor kid in Bangladesh or India. Thinking you create your own reality is an extremely privileged mindset.

Yeah but it's true if you accept that reality is not this poor kid's material living conditions, which is all maya and all suffering anyways, but rather his/her relationship with the rest of the universe or something.

didn't you hear Adam we're going to deliver moksha to that kid by telling him his belief systems are all bullshit

]Yeah but it's true if you accept that reality is not this poor kid's material living conditions, which is all maya and all suffering anyways, but rather his/her relationship with the rest of the universe or something.

― Telephoneface (Adam Bruneau), Sunday, May 15, 2011 10:29 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

yeah, this is what i was getting at upthread in talking about my own relationship w the non-material. we obviously do manufacture a great deal of our experiential relationship w/ the material world. and the material world is just sort of there you know? on the "raw dog" level, it lacks any inherent meaning, morality or value. therefore, the meaning, morality and value we experience must be largely of our own making. we "control" the world in that sense. which does verge on solopsism, as abbott says, but needn't go that far.

again, positive doublethink plays into this. as a rational materialist (which i must on some level be, as a sensible product of my era), i have to accept that there is no right and wrong, no good or evil, no love or meaning, only perception and belief, electrochemical phenomena, the interaction of particles and forces. and i'm okay with that. at the same time, i accept that the texture of human experience is inseparable from the perception of things like meaning and value - moreover that "faith" in imaginary abstractions like meaning and value is inseparable from the human experience as i know it. simply put, i guess i trust my own intuitive (and socially/biologically conditioned) manufacture of meaning, my emotions and core values. not to say that they aren't subject to examination and criticism...

this isn't all that different from religious/spiritual faith, from the belief in the supernatural or the metaphysical. we all draw this line somewhere between the extremes of materialist nihilism and spiritualist solipsism. few of us really sit out at either pole.

"solopsism" sp

thank you contenderizer for articulating what I think better than I ever bothered to.

Woah yeah that's a pretty good way of putting it! OTM

That seems like a high quality self-aware post. All that seems to be missing is the admission that the "electrochemical phenomena, the interaction of particles and forces" are as much constructions of the mind as "perception and belief".

The only reasonable models we have of these phenomena are mathematical, and while these are sufficient to allow us some predictive ability, they provide a very slim basis for understanding them. And the deeper you go into it, the less anything can be differentiated from anything else and the more it sounds indistiguishable from mysticism.

yeah, but at the precipice of quasi-mystical "everything is unknowable blargh," i step back and find comfort in scientific materialism

I think it was Stanley Cavell who said it, but truly the most amazing thing seems to be that the universe has evolved in such a way as to be able to observe itself through the phenomena of perceptual umwelt, consciousness, whatever you wanna call it.

like srsly how can you be so woefully fucking ignorant as to say "Thinking you create your own reality is an extremely privileged mindset" - do you actually know nothing whatsoever of Buddhism and Hinduism - imagining that ideas which came to be embraced by privileged westerners are therefore the invention & property of those privileged westerners is itself an expression of the most privileged mindset that can be imagined

― ...wouldn't need the talcum powder (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Sunday, May 15, 2011 1:24 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

Was talking about shit like "The Secret," actually. Stop freaking out.

i'd 100% of the time prefer "i'm not spiritual but i'm religious"

― Mordy, Thursday, May 12, 2011 2:36 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

lol yes

― goole, Friday, May 13, 2011 2:40 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

orthodox judaism and midwestern calvinism (iirc?) representing the follow-the-rules camp here

im with you guys in spirit (lol) but in practice im just another secular humanist who substitutes empiricism for truth

("you guys" being religious people, not goole and mordy, though i am with them in general)

theres a good pascal quote about prayer and belief but i cant find it. you know whos really great about this? (if you are "emo") keirkegaard

max man sometimes you say shit that makes me go "you who I fuckin like, is that max dude, he's a quality dude"

just fyi y'know

hey man im just another middle-class white guy who read nietzsche at just the right/wrong time

lol, people who find grown-up underrated a completely insufferable would straight claw their eyes out if they saw 14-year-old underrated stompin around his high school with The Portable Nietzsche under one arm at all times

contenderizer, based on your post above i think you might dig this:

"On Constructing a Reality"
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/books/Foerster-constructingreality.pdf

looking forward to foerster. had to lol right off the bat tho: "I am sure you remember the plain citizen Jourdain in Moliere's Bourgeois Gentilhomme"

ummm...

haha. i lol'd first time I read that paper at "guard the tit"

cape cod you say?

got your tape

The situation is quite different when there are two, as I shall demonstrate with the aid of the gentleman with the bowler hat (Fig. 20).

http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/jj242/donaldparsley/TGITBH-1.png

I get where yr coming from flopson, like, even "love" is just chemicals in the brain, all that kind of thing.

Fucking depressing if u ask me.

― The man who mistook his life for a FAP (Trayce), Friday, May 13, 2011 12:55 AM (12 minutes ago)

scotch is just chemicals in a glass, it's still fun and delicious.

― http://i56.tinypic.com/xnsu1g.gif (max arrrrrgh), Friday, 13 May 2011 00:13 (3 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's ALL one big thread man.

― geir was right (wk), Friday, 13 May 2011 00:18 (3 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, i'm still hoping to fall in scotch with the right girl

― always have time for the crystalline entity (contenderizer), Friday, 13 May 2011 00:18 (3 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

ha

US v. Europe: Americans more likely to say they are religious & spiritual, Europeans more likely to say they are neither religious nor spiritual pic.twitter.com/LCGQXIVNuJ

— Conrad Hackett (@conradhackett) May 29, 2018

i admit to being a little baffled by this. not by the result that conrad hackett highlights in his tweet, but something else: in western europe, "religious but not spiritual" is much more common than "spiritual but not religious". in the UK, for example, 18% describe themselves as "religious but not spiritual", while only 6% describe themselves as "spiritual but not religious".

notably, this relationship is totally reversed in the US, where only 6% would identify as "religious but not spiritual", vs 27% "spiritual but not religious"

the question (for me, at least), is whether this huge discrepancy has to do with defining the terms differently, or if it's caused by actual differences in belief. personally, my rough, working definitions for each are:

spiritual = belief in higher being(s) or some sort of supernatural order, or in the personal quest for meaning, transcendence, etc
religious = all of the above AND support or participation in some sort of human social structure/hierarchy that has organized around this belief

i can easily see how someone could be spiritual/not religious (they're into the supernatural but not into mankind's spin on it). i can also see how someone would be religious but not spiritual - that would seem to describe all the people who go to church or tell their family that they're a christian (or whatever), but don't actually believe in any of it. and maybe that's a contradiction that would be difficult to admit publicly, but much easier to admit anonymously via a poll like this? and at any rate, i don't really understand the discrepancy between the U.S. and western europe on this issue.

sorry for long post. tl;dr i'm guessing we all have wildly differering definitions of religion vs spiritual

Growing up I felt like this meant "church is boring but I like ghost stories" but I guess for most people "spiritual" probably means they're more comfortable loosely subscribing to deism?

I kind of think of it as "I have a poorly thought through (but not totally unjustified) mistrust of rationality but I also like latching onto whatever comes my way/feels good at the moment rather than having any organizing principles."

i can dig religious not spiritual and not in the hidden pretence way i think youre seeing KM

church is nice, ritual can be nice, music and the buildings and the awe of the social history involved, all that.

spirituals is wankers

It's possible, in Europe, that spiritual sounds too Californian New Age crystals dreamcatcher bollocks or else deems otm.

I guess for most people "spiritual" probably means they're more comfortable loosely subscribing to deism?

for me it is a pointless question of what is natural and what is supernatural. both of these touch our lives, both the real and the imagined are powerful influences on objective reality. i don't think a deity is required for spiritualism. many people have experiences they maybe term ghosts or spirits or whatever but maybe don't believe in God as defined by politics & popular media. many people have a more practical (as in practicing) belief in the supernatural, doing Yoga, learning about chakras, partaking in symbolic cultural celebrations, etc. possibly the modern form of discorporation through consumption, where people identify with characters brands, tv shows, movies, celebrities, politics, etc. at this point it isn't spiritualism, it is worldly-focused, it is more religious.

imo a religion is more structured, more political, more public. it has structure, hierarchy, accepted symbols, etc. spirituality is personal, a beautific, holy (as in holistic (one-ness w God) experience. something that a religion (at best) describes and can only try to transmit. religions are more like self contained universes/timelines (canon) that can still be experimental and mystical but are mostly a publicly accepted framework or channel for spiritual experience.

Anyway, wtf Portugal?

Bhakti (Sanskrit: भक्ति) literally means "attachment, participation, fondness for, homage, faith, love, devotion, worship, purity".[1] In Hinduism, it refers to devotion to, and love for, a personal god or a representational god by a devotee. In ancient texts such as the Shvetashvatara Upanishad, the term simply means participation, devotion and love for any endeavor, while in the Bhagavad Gita, it connotes one of the possible paths of spirituality and towards moksha, as in bhakti marga.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhakti

i am totally fine w/ ppl who say this, would much rather talk to someone who feels that there's something vaguely mysterious/uncanny/unsettling in the universe than a fundamentalist or someone who constantly reposts richard dawkins memes or whatever

I was having dinner at friend's house and she was acting out her day about having to testify at someone's divorce proceedings. And I said "oh and they made you swear on the bible." She was like "c'mon carey, this isn't America." I lol'd.

I was raised with no religion whatsoever, I don't believe in any higher power or practice rites of any kind, and I'm not looking to subscribe to any established supernatural belief system, but I'm fascinated with religion and trying to understand how it works upon the lives of those who do believe. And maybe ghosts are real, sure, why not. What do you call that.

Started reading some Mircea Eliade recently, good shit that.

Oh and of course now I do a quick google of the dude whose scholarly work I'd been reading in a vacuum and discover that he was a far right antisemite, so okay there is no god after all.

Just watch the Chef's Table on Jeong Kwan and you will feel better.

"spiritual but not religious" is totally american in that "rugged individualism" kind of way. god for americans is all about personal experience. it's also, in terms of measurable psychological outcomes, markedly inferior to "religious but not spiritual". "religious but not spiritual" people are the sorts who go to church for the community. they tend to be a lot happier than "spiritual, but not religious" sorts.

for me it is a pointless question of what is natural and what is supernatural. both of these touch our lives,

cool

When people says this they inevitably have many other superstitions

Classic! Come on

I’m definitely religious but not spiritual

european christianity is much sleepier than in the new world. not sure that religious ppl who'd balk at the idea of describing themselves as spiritual are really any happier, mb just in the way that europe is slightly more communal-minded and less concerned w personal paranoia and revelation. ofc the whole biz of self-definition is somewhat deluded in its individualism, yr mental landscape has been shaped by all sorts of things, you can only point yourself in a certain direction at any given time

the question (for me, at least), is whether this huge discrepancy has to do with defining the terms differently, or if it's caused by actual differences in belief.

I'd definitely say it is, at least in part, a case of a difference in definition. Over here if someone says she/he's spiritual, or a spiritual person, that more or less has come to mean this person is not religious. 'Spiritual' here has all the connotations of 'believing in something undefined', ie. something other than all the known religions ("I don't believe in (a) God but I believe there's something"). Regardless of whether it should be defined as such, it's pretty much a given. 'Spiritual' for most people has a negative, airy-fairy connotation here. Again, perhaps it shouldn't have, but it does.

In Denmark we have this term called 'culture christian', because christianity is just such a big part of society. There is no separation between church and state, and there are churches everywhere, many of them dating back hundreds of years. People go to church at christmas, perhaps even at easter too, and on ascension day they watch football. And they know the old priest Grundtvig was great, even though they can't really say why.

I would definitely say I'm religious but not spiritual as well. I'm a church singer, I'm at church several times a week, and has been for decades, and it rubs off. But I absolutely don't believe in a 'personal quest for meaning, transcendence' as KM put it, to me the whole point of religion is accepting that transcendent meaning is in the end out of reach, and that I have to make do with my limited understandings.

i don't really have anything i could define as faith, i just really, really hate Richard Dawkins

^^^^

I'm from a catholic background and have problems seeing the separation between the church and institutionalised child abuse, and usually resist throwing my radio against the wall when some smug thought for the day wanker starts sermonising. I just absolutely will not ever go near a church in my life ever again, I refuse to do funerals + weddings. The last funeral I attended was a humanist one, with thankfully no fucking priests present!

I look forward to being re-incarnated as the Mollusc Christ and gloriously getting ripped apart by something 8 times my size after 3 days of life!

i think my personal view on this is that there's a non-zero chance that there might well be some extradimensional being or beings which are sentient and could be considered 'godlike' out there somewhere

i just think it's hilariously parochial for humans to imagine that we'd have any way to communicate with or in any sense understand the thinking of a being so far removed from our own sensorium and experience of the world, or that it would have any interest in interacting with us

what would you call that? like a vaguely lovecraftian semi-gnosticism or something?

Literally it's Deism.

don't deists believe that the universe exists because god created it? that is def not for me

Oh I see, you're just saying there are perhaps some godlike beings but they aren't necessarily responsible for the universe's existence or upkeep? I mean the "creator" or at least cosmic upper management aspect is a major character trait of what usually makes a god in these theories.

yeah, basically - there could be beings with godlike characteristics out there but i doubt they had a hand in creating the universe

Unfortunately the Alan Partridge bit about God being a gas isn't on YouTube.

i stand with alan

"God is a... gas. He's not a small gas, like Calor gas, but...a large gas, like oxygen or carbon dioxide. No, carbon dioxide, that's bad isn't it...that's the Devil."

i just think it's hilariously parochial for humans to imagine that we'd have any way to communicate with or in any sense understand the thinking of a being so far removed from our own sensorium and experience of the world, or that it would have any interest in interacting with us

― i am fast and full of teeth. i willl die in a barn fire (bizarro gazzara), Wednesday, May 30, 2018 5:46 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

How dare u suggest the fathomless universe is not fundamentally anthropocentric, u monster

I was just thinking about a facet of this question this morning: I am particularly irritated by ppl who are culturally religious without having any spiritual practices. Because they identify socially as "Catholic" or "Christian" (the implied difference between those is whole other interesting topic), they tend to want to keep the door open w/r/t conservative talking points issues like LGBTQ rights, abortion, etc, but they don't do any work whatsoever to develop their spiritual life, in whatever way they understand that.

As a recovering evangelical I irrationally resent both sides of that. Evangels are probably the most egregious thing wrong with this country imo but you can't beat 'em for literally reading the bible and meditating on passages, or trying to discern god's will for their lives, or testing their faith (in mostly stupid ways but hey you can't win 'em all) and basically seeing religion as this active, participatory thing. People who don't even do any of that but are STILL entrenched behind their bigoted beliefs just make me want to explode their heads from within.

That's a very American view on this.

Come now, Catholics can't be expected to think for themselves.

Broadly speaking, I don't really see any inconsistency in that kind of dissociation.

In my experience lapsing to any degree and putting in work to create a new framework of principles to reflect your changed beliefs would make you the exception. I may be wrong but it really doesn't feel like most people ask these questions of themselves.

The homophobic/anti-abortion stances these people hold are typically deeply ingrained in childhood and we're nowhere close to being at a point where holding such ideals isn't sustainable outside of an actively religious context.

That's a very American view on this.

― Frederik B, Wednesday, May 30, 2018 2:29 PM (eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Nope. The evangelical thing is as much British colonial as it is American.

It doesn't really exist in any significant way in the UK (outside of Northern Ireland, of course).

Well, not sure how you're qualifying significance here but if we're talking status as a cultural lynchpin then yeah it's not comparable to America. That being said there are apparently 2 million Evangelicals in the UK.

I'm referring more specifically to how the dynamic would similarly play out in parts of South East Asia, most of Sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean and amongst emigres from these places where the evangelical movement seriously took hold.

"Catholic" or "Christian" (the implied difference between those is whole other interesting topic)

I remembering being in a master's in translation back in Portugal and a person just dropping "well, there's christians and then there's protestants..."

Last week I was doing some small chat about a wedding I'm going to, someone asked if there'd be mass and someone else replied "oh that's not christian, it's a catholic thing".

Neither of these people were religious or had any stake in catholicism vs protestantism, it's just the respective cultural legacies of where they're from, but I still find it fascinating that stuff like that lingers.

evangelism is, im beginning to think, the defining american trait

tsorobodo notm, fred b otm

I think you could argue that the majority of british evangelical zeal was focused abroad and was least partly formed in dialogue with/was driven by colonialism.

There’s no defining American traits, some of us are Jews for example

tsrobodo otm re: what seems to be relics of lapsed faith. the conscious 'faith' part of religion is clearly just the tip of the iceberg hence my favourite big pub debate from uni, catholic atheists v protestant atheists

the ability for americans to feel like distinctive individuals who are actually NOTHING like the assholes they are surrounded by tyvm is ofc one of their defining characteristics

xps silby ya evangelism divorced perchance from religious belief just yknow that thing of

only interrelating with others while waiting for a chance to tell them to be like u

that thing

the defining american trait is, of course, corn dogs

Last week I was doing some small chat about a wedding I'm going to, someone asked if there'd be mass and someone else replied "oh that's not christian, it's a catholic thing".

I once went to a Protestant wedding as a guest of a Catholic family, and in the dinner table conversation, the father of the family said that Protestants are "more secular" than Catholics because they don't use the title "Father" for clergy members. Idk how I kept my mouth shut.

yeah the Protestant-Catholic divide has a long, bloody, deep-rooted history. i don't see it going away any time soon.

don't deists believe that the universe exists because god created it? that is def not for me

― i am fast and full of teeth. i willl die in a barn fire (bizarro gazzara), Wednesday, May 30, 2018 7:17 AM (three hours ago) Bookmark

what anybody believes is largely up for debate. the creation of the universe is generally the primary event in any creation story or religious/mythological universe. the meanings behind it are as varied as there are religions, cults, traditions, cultures, subcultures, etc. if direct sensory knowledge is the only "real" way to experience phenomenon then it becomes ever murkier a proposition at larger and larger scales. it requires symbols and abstraction, theoretical frameworks, etc. think of religion as a framework on which to hang metaphysical theories. we use symbols and abstractions in all spheres of modern secular and consumer life because this is just a thing we humans do.

imo the universe exists because it was created. there was always the option of it not existing. whether or not he should have created it is entirely up to us to debate but never know. people always love to flaunt morality in God's face, saying oh this person has cancer, how can God do this? should they have never been born instead? think of all the death in the world and all the suffering over the course of history, should the world never have been created? some might argue it would make things less painful.

but this is not the way things work, you cannot remove the parts of life you don't like. you cannot have life without death. just as much, you cannot have death without life, and this is a mercy. there will always be life. it is a natural law, an inevitable fact, an effortless outcome. this is a grace. this is Good is it not?

The Good News or whatever can be summed up for the lay secular as sheer Self Help Optimism or whatever but saying that, hey they universe exists, maybe that's a good thing, and it should be celebrated, seems pretty chill. in Biblical terms this comes from the act of speech, of saying the Word. this is congruent with Hindu traditions of the Rishis. the origin of the Vedas were also said to be timeless sound, pre-dating mankind. at the bottom of all of this seems to be a desire for a transcendent existence w the natural world, in harmony with the vibration of nature. this doesn't seem unreasonable.

coincidentally the use of speech to create is a ritual that transcends human culture, religious and secular. the power of speech is a huge issue politically, there are marches over it, there is life sacrificed for it.

evangelism is, im beginning to think, the defining american trait

tsorobodo notm, fred b otm

― laurel or hardyhearin (darraghmac), Wednesday, May 30, 2018 3:06 PM (twenty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That's a very American view on this.

in ireland the prods def more secular than the catholics except the high church prods who are essentially catholic but better off

course catholic is divided up into actual conservative catholic which is dwindling and lapsed/cultural catholic which is prod but new money or no money

xp ive been hanging around the wrong sorts maybe

evangelism is, im beginning to think, the defining american trait

tsorobodo notm, fred b otm

― laurel or hardyhearin (darraghmac), Wednesday, May 30, 2018 3:06 PM (twenty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That's a very American view on this.

― tsrobodo, Wednesday, May 30, 2018 11:29 AM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Nope. The evangelical thing is as much British colonial as it is American.

who are the big briisg colonials nowadays

british

Yeah ok guys so there's ex-British colonies where this applies and other countries, including the UK itself and also Ireland, where it doesn't really, don't see why that has to be a fite?

xp start a thread

i dunno why this is seen as fighting!

in the back of my mind, i kept asking myself how many agnostics are left

it's an interesting trend, because my understanding was that a few years ago, there were more agnostics in western europe than in the u.s.

looking at the charts, it looks like western europe has gone from quite a few agnostics to almost all non-believing/non-religious. a report on why this is the case would be very interesting

in the meantime, here are the old pew data sets for europe:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_atheism#Europe

and the post revive of this thread included a tweet with a new chart. you can see the complete analysis of that study here:

http://www.pewforum.org/2018/05/29/being-christian-in-western-europe/

really fascinating and interesting that the tweet decided to highlight only one small chart. see the second chart in the study for example, which tells a different story:

http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2018/05/23104941/PF_05.29.18_religion.western.europe-00-00-.png

http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2018/05/23104941/PF_05.29.18_religion.western.europe-00-00-.png

agnostics spotted that they hadnt been smitten with lightning and actually said what they meant

what i'm getting at is that the devil is in the details

western europeans are not entirely without spirituality or at least have some less conservative form of "religion" when compared to the u.s.

or say whatever to get their kids into a good school

the report is 9 pages long

it's kinda crazy just after glancing at a few pages

I'm not sure why you think that second chart tells a different story?

I'd definitely say it is, at least in part, a case of a difference in definition. Over here if someone says she/he's spiritual, or a spiritual person, that more or less has come to mean this person is not religious. 'Spiritual' here has all the connotations of 'believing in something undefined', ie. something other than all the known religions ("I don't believe in (a) God but I believe there's something"). Regardless of whether it should be defined as such, it's pretty much a given. 'Spiritual' for most people has a negative, airy-fairy connotation here. Again, perhaps it shouldn't have, but it does.

― lbi's life of limitless european glamour (Le Bateau Ivre), Wednesday, May 30, 2018 4:26 AM (six hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I would definitely say I'm religious but not spiritual as well. I'm a church singer, I'm at church several times a week, and has been for decades, and it rubs off. But I absolutely don't believe in a 'personal quest for meaning, transcendence' as KM put it, to me the whole point of religion is accepting that transcendent meaning is in the end out of reach, and that I have to make do with my limited understandings.

― Frederik B, Wednesday, May 30, 2018 5:20 AM (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

thanks very much for these posts, LBI and Frederik - this is pretty close to what i expected, as far as how the terms are understood in different ways.

i've typed out epic posts a couple different times and deleted them (trying to do the world a favor for once), but the short version is just that i normally wouldn't describe "goes to church but isn't looking for meaning" as "religious".

in my experience, it's just not that common around here - when people attend a worship service it's usually implied that they believe in what they're hearing as well. as an example of how heated and toxic this subject can be in the US, check this out - https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/364196/word-for-fake-religious-people - the way the question is asked is loaded with assumptions and implied norms, of course, and then the suggestions are things like "closet atheist", "religious pretenders", and "hypocrite".

ironically, i'm married to a big reminder of how that's not true across the board in the US. her family is jewish and most of them attend synagogue a couple times a year but i wouldn't describe them as "religious" at all. they attend services and enjoy the community in the way that frederik and darraghmac described above.

but at least for me, the evangelical influence weighs HEAVY around here

I'm not sure why you think that second chart tells a different story?

― Frederik B, Wednesday, May 30, 2018 9:35 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's more to do with the connotation of "neither religious nor spiritual," which is the chart the tweet focused on

putting aside cultural catholicism and christianity, if you say you are neither religious nor spiritual to a north american, that sounds like you're saying you are not christian/muslim/jewish, which is obviously not the case in europe. to quote the pew survey:

Yet most adults surveyed still do consider themselves Christians, even if they seldom go to church. Indeed, the survey shows that non-practicing Christians (defined, for the purposes of this report, as people who identify as Christians, but attend church services no more than a few times per year) make up the biggest share of the population across the region. In every country except Italy, they are more numerous than church-attending Christians (those who go to religious services at least once a month). In the United Kingdom, for example, there are roughly three times as many non-practicing Christians (55%) as there are church-attending Christians (18%) defined this way.

the chart i posted (the second in the report), clearly says western europeans are non-practising christians, so there is less confusion

i pretend to believe in astrology to talk to girls

Lol flopson that might work in 1995

still works, Ross

Flops whats yr zodiac sign

I had a girl read my chart in front of my ex and say “if you guys got together it would be beautiful and mad” and I was thinking Well, yeah. We did.

i know people that run magic stores, sell Tarot decks, do readings, Reiki, etc. i have friends that give massages and do sound therapy. i have friends that use reclaimed witch & sorcerer imagery for show fliers, zines, art. probably 1/4 of my friends regularly post astrology charts in their social media. i am not going to try and argue with any of them that it isn't real or that magic doesn't really exist. what a waste of time.

ive had my chart read. you can't deny that sitting down and going through a process of self-analysation (however bs the power of the cards may objectively be) can produce some amount of insight or realization as a result. many of my friends have made art inspired by the tarot. some of them have approached the material with a spiritual attitude and some of them with a purely secular aesthetic admiration. both is fine, they are not hurting anyone. if anything they are creating things and partaking in an age-old global folk culture.

thats what our paedo priests said

Tarot as we now know it was mostly ginned up by some Golden Dawn weirdos sometime last century iirc

they saw it on 60 minutes

as i posted on another thread ten mins ago

is that where my rep for inscrutability comes from i wonder

It’s of a piece

i know people that run magic stores, sell Tarot decks, do readings, Reiki, etc. i have friends that give massages and do sound therapy. i have friends that use reclaimed witch & sorcerer imagery for show fliers, zines, art. probably 1/4 of my friends regularly post astrology charts in their social media. i am not going to try and argue with any of them that it isn't real or that magic doesn't really exist. what a waste of time.

In the last few years, I’ve definitely noticed an uptick of interest in tarot and astrology among hipster-ish women I know, mostly in their late 20: buying books, occasionally paying for readings, making comments like, “That’s such a Capricorn thing to do.” The coffee shop I play music trivia at started offering monthly tarot nights, and a each month has a night where people can do chart readings for a particular zodiac sign. They’ll usually say, “I don’t really believe in it, but it’s fun to think about,” though they’ll get defensive if someone mocks astrology or tarot. No idea whether a correlation, but I remember really noticing it after Trump was elected—reminded me of the counterculture interest in astrology and New Age stuff ramping up when Nixon was elected. Searching for a guiding light in turbulent times etc.

i think they're trolling tbh

it's definitely an ironic twitter-induced affectation

I have opinions but it's Friday and pub and just chillax it's all semiotics and fun people

Although I also wanted to ref the best bit in Foucault's Pendulum where the 60s political bookshops turn into 80s magic and new age bookshops

Tarot as we now know it was mostly ginned up by some Golden Dawn weirdos sometime last century iirc

there are precedents for card games and divining systems all over the world from before that. modern tarot decks predate the Renaissance. there is the Italian card game Tarocchini originating in the 17th century. this fits in line with the birth of modern occultism, the alchemy and kabbalah movements, etc. on one level we can call it out as Orientalism or cultural colonialism, yet no doubt influenced by the global access granted from new technology (the printed word).

by the time it hit the 19th century spiritualism movements it was a modern US cultural phenomenon, almost a "fad" by modern standards. tho the coastal elites like the Golden Dawn get the most attention it was more or less a national thing. plenty of poltergeist sighting were spotted throughout rural US. plenty of mediums became local celebrities, holding court, giving readings, which sometimes turned out to be quite the evening social event, complete with booze and nudity. ofc you had your power mad back stabbing nerds translating books and plotting against them but the spiritualist movement goes far beyond the big groups.

I don’t think these people are trolling

My current interest is a girl who charges 60 bucks a pop for an energy healing session. Quite confounding to me

There's no shame in finding interest in stuff like tarot. It piggybacks onto some very old archetypal imagery that seems to hold its power across the millennia. Just look at the Assyrian winged bull sculptures or Tibetan demons, and you can see how this stuff still connects to something in our brains.

The real shame is in thinking these images can mystically reveal the unknowable future, rather than prompt one to see a bit deeper into one's own mind, thereby uncovering some ideas and motives that may not have been visible to you, but were there and operating out of view, subconsciously.

60 bucks a pop for an energy healing session. Quite confounding to me

most physicians, if they are honest, know that very few of their treatments or therapies are doing any of the heavy lifting of healing their patients. it's the body's systems that still must do the lion's share of the work. most medical help is in the nature of minor assistance to the body's immune system or regenerative powers.

I have great respect for the placebo effect, and there's every chance that your friend is doing her clients some good, if only by enhancing the placebo effect, and assisting the body's own healing ability through unconventional means. the 60 bucks is part of the therapy and lends a seriousness to the exchange that both parties believe in. there are WAY more true believers practicing this stuff than outright charlatans.

you know what a body can really believe in, is sixty bucks

Oh Britany

On “He Loves Me,” you sing about having God’s love even while you’re doing whatever the hell you want. Are you a religious person?

I’m not religious. I don’t blame anybody for being religious but it’s not my thing. But I’m definitely a spiritual person. I wrote this song for people who feel they can’t have a relationship with God because they think they have to be Christian, or religious, have all these rules, sins. I was like that, definitely afraid. And then my sister died, and it was like: There is no God. Because why would God do that to a kid? The way she died was very painful to watch.

Then, as I got older, I just changed my mind. I really missed having that connection to something. So I just started learning how to have a relationship with God. And that’s what that song is about.

these rules, sins

is there anything more dud than taking issue with this sentiment?

Who even knows what is meant by "spirituality" at this point? It covers so many bases, including religious and quasi-religious beliefs and practices.

i am for some reason more into people being part of the religious heritage that they have roots in and embodies tradition, transmission from the ancestors, etc. than vague woo woo ideas or adoption of alien belief systems, and do roll my eyes at "im not religous, but i am spiritual" in general, but i suppose that's authenticity shit that i wouldn't be into in other contexts. but the heart wants what it wants.

interestingly both religion and spirituality are quite hard concepts to pin down with exactitude. like explain to me the what religion and spirituality are, and what they aren't, and what the difference is.

I’m not spiritual but I am religious

Already posted that a few years ago lol

i'm not religious but i'd do anything for woo woo

it it like how people get mad at the simpsons Viking thing?

Old answer: dud, mostly
New answer: classic, mostly
But:

this is the 'everything but country and rap' of religion

― iatee, Thursday, 12 May 2011 19:38 (nine years ago)

afaic spirituality is anything that isn't positivistic atheist materialism*

religion (*let's include this for a gratuitous hot take) seems to require the kind of cultural rootedness and historical continuity which is probably great if you're not some kind of misfit, the kind who doesn't want to be saved in the prescribed ways- or if you're in a religious community that's so open and nondogmatic it might as well be SBNR

Being this - potentially classic. Saying it - dud.

If it were phrased as, "I recognize in myself an innate need for belief in something intangible that makes the world meaningful to me and helps me keep my fear of death at bay, but I refuse to connect that to any organized religion," I don't think anyone would have a problem with it. The "I'm not religious but I am spiritual" line is a dud because it's a.) cliched and b.) permanently associated with white people co-opting indigenous cultural traditions.

i don't even own a spirit

complaining about the line is as much a cliche as the line itself but b) is a serious problem

this is white problem in general but it comes through a lot in the spiritual stuff. probably it's still perceived as a kind of frontier, maybe also as a potential source of some kind of moral absolution or existential justification in the colonial context idk

Lily Dale otm

lol mookie

but i cant start a thread at all, like?

Let people say things imo

Feeling feverish atm and self-isolating, sorry if this is incoherent
Dud because it's ambiguously critical of religious observance without making clear any distinction in name or (imo) in practice a lot of the time. "Spirituality" could mean asceticism. Or it could mean superstition, or animism, or universality or religious mysticism, or any combination of these things and others which are very often properties of "religion" as well. Since there are names for these things, we might as well use them imo instead of drawing distinctions where perhaps there are none and creating false dichotomy.

It's easy enough to say that you're a solitary practitioner, or have indeterminate supernatural beliefs, or dabble in the practices of one or more religions without observing any of them stringently.

Re: white people co-opting indigenous and nonwestern modalities- It irks me, for example, when "seekers" refer to religious traditions like Buddhism or Daoism as "philosophy". Like, maybe to you? Western Yijing studies for example have been plagued by a Sinophobic attitude that the Chinese are unfit custodians of their own heritage imo.

Assuming RBNS = observing religious traditions in which you do not necessarily believe, its meaning is much clearer than SBNR

Wonder why

RBNS honestly describes probably 75% of self-professed "Christians" ime. The other 25% are evangelicals who hear voices telling them to stone unbelievers.

It's ALL one big thread man.

― geir was right (wk), Friday, 13 May 2011 00:18 (thirteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

#

this is one of those topics that ilx is particularly insufferable about. 100% classic. there is nothing wrong with this statement. in fact it's unalloyed Good. the appropriation argument is so phony. one version of white fragility over another. and the cliche argument is just like, are you permanently in high school or something.

this is one of those topics that ilx is particularly insufferable about.

sure, and I don't think ilx needs to cover every topic, or should

the appropriation argument is so phony

ehh I don't know if "appropriation" is the problem exactly tho it has consequences
I def see a lot of whitewashing that is very racist tho
idk how much of my day I want to spend here, and I def don't want to anonymously slander talented and well meaning people I have worked for and with on a messageboard they do not read.
but I'll try and come back to this.

I def see a lot of whitewashing that is very racist tho

yeah i can see this. i was weirdly prickly coming in here. i've never actually heard anyone say the thread title statement tbh. maybe it correlates with other attitudes, i don't really know.

i think i was responding to the beginning of this thread, ye olde ilx, wherein saying something like "spirituality is important" would be sneered at by a certain kind of person, which ilx was full of at the time. it's definitely a friendlier place today than it was, with some thoughtful spiritual people among mostly society-and-culture atheist types. it's still a place where discussing spirituality freely would feel fraught and potentially embarrassing, but that's probably true of anywhere.

i remember an old thread, i'm sure i'm forgetting key parts of it, where someone was making a solid argument that appropriation by itself, if it's ever done without racism involved, isn't a bad thing. that taken to an extreme, the appropriation = bad pov preemptively marks ethnic religious traditions off-limits based on identity. i tend to agree with those things, broadly, but realize on this subject it's easy to overstep and put foot in mouth.

I get it. 'can the thoughtful spiritual ilxors create a space to talk about it comfortably and openly' is a constructive approach.

but that's probably true of anywhere.

and that's a very interesting topic itself. I'm not sure that's true fwiw, but I would say that a lot of the spaces devoted to this are not the most "intellectual" (and some are anti-intellectual for various reasons both good and not good)

I'll come back to all of this!

<3

like remember this guy? this kind of thing was / is so dumb. and yet so convinced of its own brilliance.

this is the 'everything but country and rap' of religion

― iatee, Thursday, May 12, 2011 8:38 PM (thirteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

i think you could make an argument that saying "I'm not religious but I am spiritual" is a consumptive attitude because the statement is received from hyper-mediated sources, if my suspicion is right that it emanates somewhat from a type of person in films and tv and pop novels and, these days, instagram. but on the other hand, what isn't these days? it doesn't necessarily negate the qualitative potential in the statement being made by an individual person imo.

i'm also broadly very suspicious of organized religion and supportive of individual exploration and choice when it comes to spirituality. i'm sure that attitude is shaped by my background and blind spots. it's worked very well for me leaving an especially parasitic cult/religion and needing to put spiritual roots down in a friendlier space in order to not be miserable.

there is nothing wrong with this statement. in fact it's unalloyed Good

In my own mind I connect this statement to ideas Lao-Tzu expressed long ago in the Tao-Teh-Ching, basically saying that religion begins in our valiant attempts through ritual to create a bridge from the quotidian sense of things-as-usual to the sense of awe and wonder at things-as-they-truly-are, but that these attempts are doomed to fail, because the creation of ritual unavoidably runs the risk of becoming empty of meaning, as the formality of going through the prescribed motions, or from mere superstition and ignorance of things-as-they-truly-are.

The criticism of the statement in this thread appears to be about people who are adopting rituals they understand only ignorantly, and practicing them in an attitude that amounts to little more than empty superstition with a dash of racism thrown in for good measure.

leaving an especially parasitic cult/religion and needing to put spiritual roots down in a friendlier space in order to not be miserable.

yes, I've known and understood this about you (and known and worked with a lot of people coming from the same place)

what are the practices, modalities or beliefs that are working well for you? that's great to hear!

heya dm, thanks :)

i'm finally starting a daily meditation practice. it's pretty messy and free-form right now. just quieting my mind for a few minutes is great though. i am finding clearer access to light and peace because of it though, and it reflects in how i speak to myself and others.

i've been an exercise freak for years and it hasn't always been a spiritual thing, but over the last few years it's become more that way. movement, presence, and possibility combining together enough times to feed my spirit, almost as a byproduct.

xp to aimless that's a nice thought from lao-tzu, thanks for sharing it.

Hey map, I'm not sure if this is what you intended, but I was in the middle of a housemate meeting, popped onto ilx for a second, saw this:

the appropriation argument is so phony. one version of white fragility over another. and the cliche argument is just like, are you permanently in high school or something.

scrolled up and saw you seemed to be angrily belittling me for something I wrote three years ago. And it made me feel pretty shitty, and I had to explain to my housemates that I wasn't reacting to what we were talking about but to something on the internet.

And yes, I am permanently in high school; it's what I teach.

The individualism of “being spiritual sans religion” has always been unappealing to me as I don’t know how you extend out of yourself and meet others in communal understanding if your spirituality is just that: your spirituality.
Communal understanding is an irreducibly positive thing to me and I fear “spirituality” clouds that. This extends from what I understand religion to be: shared spiritual belief and practice. So it’s kinda like, if your spirituality is shared by others, if others are involved as subjects, not just objects in your practice, then it is religion to me by definition?

It’s not that I wholesale dismiss the individualistic. Religion (communal/exterior) without spirituality (individualistic/interior) is just as unappealing for ya know… obvious reasons. Without the individualistic there is no humanity, no faith, no risk, no life, no challenge, no beauty. I’m skeptical of anything that dissects the symbiotic relationship of religion and spirituality for the above reasons.

Anyways, my definition/dichotomy of spirituality/religion is maybe not shared? Interested on your thoughts on this if you’re willing to share map. I haven’t thought all this through, and I don’t mean to imply that practices which are obviously good (meditation, mindfulness, gratitude, etc.) are bad because they’re “individualistic”. The health of the individual is a good thing in and of itself too….. I just like…. Feel like it misses something if it stays in the individual realm? Just as I think the ritual/aesthetics or religious practices are good but miss something if it they just stay there.

i'm sorry lily :(

i revived this with some baggage and ended up being callous. i love your presence here and i wish you well.

Thank you map. I am sorry in turn if what I wrote upthread upset you. I probably wasn't thinking it through enough.

haha no, no need to apologize for that. :)

I like your interpretation of (I assume) verse 38, Aimless. Beautifully worded. Of course, the Daodejing is much more ambiguous than that :D

map, of course, I should have known. all of that sounds really nice. I can't seem to come to grips with body work myself. It's something I know I'm missing and need to integrate in order to become whole but I can't find an agreeable enough point of entry except...

our valiant attempts through ritual to create a bridge from the quotidian sense of things-as-usual to the sense of awe and wonder at things-as-they-truly-are

...like, just shooting hoops in my friend's driveway (again, beautifully put). It helps, IME, to keep rituals quotidian. Not Samhain, but Halloween. Maybe it’s harder for rites to become empty form when they are your own real life.

About whitewashing. There's a New Yorker article that ought to be linked here about the Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-erasure-of-islam-from-the-poetry-of-rumi

Ah dang, paywalled

But I think these kinds of “translations” regard Islam as too ugly, so ugly that they can’t allow the ugliness of Islam to sully these beautiful poems. And you might think, these poems are showing how Islam is beautiful.

The healers, acupuncturists and herbalists in my life have at least one thing in common- They all have that damn Daniel Ladinsky “Hafez” book on their shelf .
…

Okay the thing I was talking about 4 years ago re: Yijing studies has to do with how the “modern” scholarly understanding of the book has slowly started to influence or infiltrate the popular tradition of Yijing practice in the west.

L1 F3ng (who I know IRL) starts his book on the history of Early China by introducing the Doubting Antiquity School of the early 20th c:

The deepening frustration with China’s political reality since the late nineteenth century had come to a head in the May Fourth Movement in 1919. The reflection of this political–cultural current in historical studies was the so-called “Doubting Antiquity” movement led by Gu Jiegang (1893–1980), a young graduate from Beijing University who began in 1921 to formulate his own theory of Chinese history. To Gu, the received textual tradition about China’s antiquity was the piling up of layered fabrications produced in the later periods, because quite obviously texts dated later, particularly from the Han Dynasty, often have more to say than early texts about their contemporary time. Although these sources can be used to study the intellectual mentality of the Warring States to Han times, they are ultimately invalid as sources for early history. In the words of Gu’s spiritual mentor Hu Shih, China’s history has to be cut short by at least two thousand years, to start only with the Eastern Zhou period (770–256 BC).

He goes on to say, essentially, that even though much of this approach has long since been debunked in China on the grounds it’s built on the logical fallacy that absence of evidence = evidence of absence, the Doubting Antiquity School still has an outsize influence on western scholarship of ancient China today.

Now, Martin Kern (in a recent essay, ‘Beyond Nativism’) talks about the attacks on “doubting antiquity” in China today as equivalent to a rejection of modernity. It

“reflects a premodern mind that insists on a mythological, idealized past that cannot be questioned, where tradition must be taken as literally “true” as long as it cannot be “proven” otherwise.

I think that’s representative of the western view, more or less. As more western diviner/practitioners encounter these ideas in some shape or form, I see more often the attitude that the Chinese are not skeptical enough (rich, coming from fortune tellers!), that they’re “premodern” in some way. That in fact the Yijing may not even be Chinese because “there was no China”. I’ve even heard it argued that readers educated in the PRC with literacy in Chinese have no advantage over those with access to English translations of excavated manuscripts- And I gotta admit, it was a really big deal for me personally to be able to approach the text without the air of profundity I associated with “Zhexue”. The influence of “doubting antiquity” gave me permission to be playful with it, and without this I prob would’ve walked.

The other thing I meant: a lot of Westerners approach this practice expressly for “self-development” carrying ideas about “ego death” and the like from other modalities, but asking only personal questions. There’s lots of “how can I get a boyfriend”, “how can I get a better job”, and very little “what is the nature of cats and dogs”- That’s fine! No judgement whatsoever. But some of these people frown upon more “superstitious” or “predictive” approaches, whereas most popular traditions of fortune telling in China don’t really have what you might call a “psychological” aspect. It’s more like, “will the Eagles win the super bowl.” Wenwanggua and Meihua Yishu, for example, are purely predictive subsystems of Yijing divination which are really “big” in China but haven’t been written about much in English. On one Yijing messageboard, although people can and do ask predictive questions, any mention of these subsystems is immediately and aggressively policed off the main threads and relegated to the “off topic” section of the board. Because these systems are based on later manuals which “are not the Yijing” and unsuspecting n00bs might become confused or something. IOW the Chinese have not differentiated sufficiently between the *actual* Yijing and other texts.

^ Its “true calling” or “true destiny” was to become the ultimate western self-help book

the actual thread had plenty of takedown of the initial statement as well as plenty of varied viewpoints and discussion, even tho it was a pun bump i think that's worth pointing out

Making my way through this (excellent, only read a 1/3 tho') thread for the first time.

Contendrizer made some excellent posts. This is from one for them, and might just be where I am at in regards to this question. Mostly due to getting a deeper practice of yoga in the West for a decade now:

"your core beliefs don't change, but your relationship to the idea of belief does."

In class just this weekend we were doing tree pose. Its one of the easiest poses in yoga. Balance on one leg and hey presto! But while a lot of people get the balance they do not keep the hips level while taking the knee back, so they end up distorting the outline of the pose.

One student was very resistant to the idea there was anything wrong but my teacher wouldn't have it. At one point she said, what about 'satya'? Which means truth. The reality the student wouldn't face is she didn't have enough opening to extend the knee back (its fine, an extension you can practice and that you can get). What was interesting is how from doing something physical we went into something ethical, and we could have gone on to a philosophical realm, but what my teacher said was: what about your spiritual growth?

Which was fucking funny. But a few years of practicing I am taking that stuff in. I wasn't laughing.

Unfortunately also want to map this to politics.

10+ years on from this thread I see people at Trump rallies...I mean every political rally is sort of like this congregation, but to listen to a guy for god knows how many hours ramble on...and he has a good chnace of winning too! But many ppl are like going 'this is our guy' to congregate around with like a big happy family, feeding their souls in some way.

Then look at something like climate change, which has a discourse built on a rational, verifiable system that tells you the planet is heating, all to at least half of the audience being schooled to some of the ways this is quantified. Outcome: The planet is going to burn to some extent that a lot of bad things have not only happened but even worse ones will occur. Its been a disaster.

I think what this thread needs is some Rusted Root Neologisms

Of course, the Daodejing is much more ambiguous than that :D

That ambiguity is much better designed to its purpose than my dried and diced version, but we live in a more prosaic age with less patience for ambiguity.

Maybe it’s harder for rites to become empty form when they are your own real life.

Q: When are the Ten Thousand Things not Ten Thousand Things?
A: ;-)

Aimless that's it!

(^there was more of this but I had to abort and go to work)

I meant to throw this up here re: whitewashing and appropriation
Translations of Laozi by People Who Do Not Know Chinese

this too:
https://www.itzhakbeery.com/the-bitter-side-of-ayahuasca.html

I have a lot of critical stuff to say about the author of this second one but

The collision of a gift economy with a money economy is never going to be pretty for the gift economy. It's not hard to understand why.

just reread... this guy sucks
but i like his suggestion that everyone should go hug a tree and ask it to tell you something

Foreigners and local non-tribal people venture into the Amazon jungle buying land and opening retreats. Yes, at first they employ shamans, but only until they feel they have learned how to lead the ceremonies themselves. Then the shamans are dismissed. Meanwhile, the newcomer’s presence raises real-estate prices for the natives.

Richard Lynn:

Where this anomalous trend originated and why it so tenaciously persists are questions that can actually be found during the early days of Laozi translation, when interpretation was largely in terms foreign to the Chinese tradition but congenial to Westerners already familiar with the “Oriental” thought of Hinduism and Indian Buddhism who could relate the Dao to Brahman and Dharma. The classically educated also could associate it with the religious thought of Pythagorus, the anima mundi (world soul) of Plato and the Neo-Platonists, Gnosticism and other ancient and medieval traditions of mysticism. Its first Western students, Jesuit missionaries, started a trend to detach the Laozi from the Chinese tradition and universalize it by supposedly finding Christian dogma, especially the Trinity, prefigured in it. Such forced similarity of concepts provided access to a text that for translators and readers seemed otherwise inaccessible. Present-day Laozi “translations,” examples of “Eastern and Oriental Thought,” “Religion and Spirituality,” or “Self-Help and Self- Realization,” are products of a process in which similar is passed off as same, and difference is downplayed or ignored. Such “translations” seamlessly join East and West in palatable servings, with accessibility and marketability the watchwords of all concerned. Other characteristics include (1) Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, introductions to such “translations” largely continue to assert that Laozi (Master Lao) was its single author, avoiding the thorny issue of authorship. Readers thus are assured they have access to a “scripture” by a genuine Oriental sage with whom to identify. (2) Anything not easily accessible in literal translation is paraphrased in terms of familiar experience. The Good News Bible (1966) similarly paraphrases the deeply learned and sophisticated prose of the King James Version of the Holy Bible (1611), which while easier to read loses much in accuracy of meaning. (3) As an exemplar of wisdom literature, the Laozi is largely de-sinified, because if too “Chinese” it would threaten accessibility and offend a non-Chinese readership.

word document: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Richard-John-Lynn-2/publication/360289524_Reception_and_Translation_of_Laozi_Final_Draft_2022/links/626d705e0df856128f8a9361/Reception-and-Translation-of-Laozi-Final-Draft-2022

Lynn otfm

I don't think M4rtin K3rn himself is even slightly racist tbc, I think he's terrific. I think he feels China is richer for its disunity and discontinuity so why sweep that under the rug … whatever I was going to say about the ten thousand things the other day, it probably had to do with that, and with people from a diversity of traditions coming together maybe.

I started taking an interest in witchcraft when I was in high school, for kinda superficial reasons- I had a crush on a boy who claimed to be into Wicca (I also got into the Yijing because of a Pink Floyd song initially, we all start somewhere :D) Mostly, I was reading books and staging rituals alone.

At that time, the idea that you could practice Wicca -or I guess by extension witchcraft - by yourself *at all* was, I would say, not so widely accepted. There were books aimed at “solitaries” who really wanted to practice but didn’t have access to a coven or community. But being a solitary in a place like NYC, I don’t think anyone in the community would have taken that very seriously then, because in their view you needed a group to do “real” magick.

I thought that was a very narrowminded attitude, at the time, and I was utterly intimidated by the community “gatekeepers” then. But when I was around 30, I went through something traumatic that made me want to rededicate myself to witchcraft, and sought out one of the originators of the NYC Wiccan community. I ended up becoming her “apprentice” and working at her occult store in the Bronx. And I got to regularly experience the kind of energy field that a coven or any group of people working magick together could generate. It was *incredible*!! Just astonishing.

And then I understood what the gatekeepers had meant, who had said you can’t practice Wicca by yourself. Because you’re not really getting the full experience. It just isn’t possible. And yet, I still think that’s a very narrow definition of what Wicca can be, or how the material can be used. It took me years to notice how influential my early solitary study and practice had been on my general worldview, how I think and what about, and how much it’s enriched my life. That stuff is deeply ingrained. And in that light, the question of whether to call it religion or spirituality… it’s just so unimportant, it’s a non-thing. Doesn’t matter in the slightest. It would never occur to me to consider it. I have no idea.

Would I call it either one? I don't know. Maybe neither. It is what it is.

I used to get together and chant Dhikr once a week with a small group in my neighborhood. And two of the people were deeply devoted exclusively to Sufism and Islam. But most of us were incorporating this into our own personal gumbo, occasionally we'd get someone who just wanted to dabble or try it out. And we'd talk about other modalities we were exploring. And chanting Dhikr with this group was absolutely ecstatic.

I'm not really sure what's meant by "communal understanding", I've been to church and temples and there's a sort of quiet understanding or acknowledgement that I've experienced but this is an area I really know nothing about.

But working in the store, we were able to generate these very potent energy fields with basically whoever showed up, with people who were into all kinds of stuff, and push that out into the world... I don't think there was a shared religion, maybe there was some amount of overlap or commonality, maybe not. But I think mutual curiosity could be enough. As long as everyone was sincere, and willing to participate fully.

fwiw my understanding had been that "religion" implies some aderence to a doctrine, I mean obv in our modern secular world there are degrees, there are liberties taken, and source material is always endlessly reinterpreted- but just as a broader... uh, thing :D "spirituality" might be understood to mean there's more openness and freedom to deviate from that and explore other areas.

And the other edge of that sword is what Richard Lynn is describing, where sometimes people look at another tradition and are only able to see in it what they already know, and there's a flattening out of "the ten thousand things" into "the only thing"

I mean, even at the store where I worked, Wicca was very popular in 1998 but sort of a punchline by 2014. We'd get a lot more people to show up for Santeria workshops.

But like initiation into Santeria demands a lot of lifestyle changes- NY Yankees grooming standards, abstinence from intoxicants and other things that your average NYC queer witch doesn't want to deal with. And for every person who was really serious about Santeria there were 10-20 people who were looking for material to appropriate or incorporate (depending on how you see this), and who ended up basically practicing Wicca with a thin Santeria veneer...