The need to believe?

[Thumpalumpacus]

For those who are of a  "spiritual but not religious" nature, please define spiritual.
No snippage of previous posts please; I'm looking for a definition of 'spiritual'.

I've already provided the usage I and many others go by.

[mordant]

Hey Ben, and thanks for your thoughts. You pose a good question - how important is the truth? I think that to the best of anyone's knowledge, it's safe to say no one really knows with certainty, one way or the other, if a deity exists.

No one knows any truth with 100% certainty. Everything is a preponderance of evidence and while with respect to specific deities the probabilities are 99.99% of those specific gods not existing (being charitable here), the question is not "do I know for sure" but "is there any valid reason to afford belief to this?"

I have to stop living for my emotions, though. We're not slaves to our emotions, and that's likely why so many religions can manipulate people, it preys on our vulnerabilities and emotions.

I can tell that you're a person that "leads with" your emotions, who feels things deeply, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that per se. It does however mean that you have extra work to do, to push back against confirmation bias, agency inference, and just generally giving subjective feelings too much evidential weight. I'm probably the rough opposite of you, I lead with my intellect and am often not that in touch with my emotions. That's got its own downsides too. I don't think you have anything to apologize for or wish for here, but you simply have to develop discipline around your feelings so they don't intrude ON your intellect and maybe override it under stress. And somehow do that while still being authentic.

This is very similar to someone who is a gourmand, who truly loves and lives for food; that's fine, so long as it doesn't lead to food addiction or obesity, etc. Or someone who lives for runner's high, which is fine so long as you understand the stress that puts on your physically and you don't end up with your toenails falling off, etc. It's just a different way of being, with its own strengths and vulnerabilities.

As an atheist, I felt honest with myself, yet emotionally a bit empty. In faith, I feel intellectually dishonest (to be honest), and emotionally a bit better. Less empty, but not necessarily ''full.'' I just don't want to live on a fence, that's all.

Your statement here suddenly made something "click" for me. I've never understood the sort of agnostic who can't seem to decide if god exists or not (they are fairly rare, actually, although many believers seem to think that's the ONLY manifestation of agnosticism). Such agnostics seem tormented by their own inability to decide. And maybe that's because something like what you're talking about is going on: there is discomfort for them, emotionally or in some other way, on both sides of that belief position. I used to think it was because they (wrongly in my view) calculate the "odds of gods" at something close to 50%, and I suppose that COULD be one source of such indecision. But I'll bet it's really just that they're equally uncomfortable with both concepts, maybe even frequently for the reason you cite.

In your case, the question is, how do you take care of yourself emotionally if you take the atheist belief position? As I mentioned before, in my case, I'm actually becoming MORE comfortable emotionally because my misfortunes as a believer just made me confused, angry and resentful due to unmet expectations that my faith had set. You on the other hand trade one discomfort for another.

Many atheists talk about a sense of awe regarding science, the universe, natural beauty, so emotional stimulation is not lacking on that side of the fence. You simply may have neglected it, thinking it wasn't important or desirable. If you haven't done so, watch videos of Carl Sagan or Neil Degrasse Tyson sometime -- those guys are STOKED about the vastness and beauty of the cosmos, with no help from religious ideology at all. Maybe you simply need to put more of an emphasis on things that feed your emotional needs without committing intellectual suicide in the process. Something to consider anyway.

Also since the death of a family member was your "trigger" here, consider ways to fully confront the fact of mortality -- yours, and others. A big help to me was the writings of Ernst Becker, particularly Denial of Death, which, if you ignore his constant and distracting digressions about his hero Freud, goes a long way to provoke you to think differently about mortality (it's all the more powerful because it was written by a dying man -- during his final illness).

As framed by religion, mortality is a horrible, unthinkable thing to be avoided with afterlives and other magical compensators. When understood properly, though, it looses virtually all of that "fear factor". I do not have a malfunction with my mortality and do not fear it; my only fear is concerning the process of dying, not death itself. And that applies to my family members ... I would be far more upset for example if my son's death had been protracted and excruciating. It was sudden and quick and merciful, and that helped a great deal. The fact that he is gone is not a source of endless despair, even though it's something I'll always have to live with and I'll always miss him. I recognize that death -- even untimely death -- is simply a part of life. That we are creatures of time, and tellers of stories, who need beginnings, middles, and yes -- ends.

Becker talks about "immortality projects" that people engage in to ease their fear of death and to convince themselves on some level that they're exempt from it. Religion is one of those immortality projects. Check Becker out, I think it might be helpful to you. The best way to get rid of fear is to de-mystify what you fear. Running from it helps, but only so long as you keep running, and that's exhausting before long.

[Succubus]

For those who are of a  "spiritual but not religious" nature, please define spiritual.
No snippage of previous posts please; I'm looking for a definition of 'spiritual'.

I've already provided the usage I and many others go by.

I'm more than familiar with the 'usage', it’s a definition I'm looking for.

[mordant]

Myself, I find that void filled with simple love. In hard times, I turn to my family, my woman, my friends, and don't worry even what I myself think. And even love doesn't always make things easier -- it only makes them easier to deal with.

My Certain Someone and I were talking just earlier about the limits of logic. I'm of the mind that emotion has just as rightful a place in the human experience as logic and reason, and I make no apologies, even to myself, when on this or that occasion I cotton to emotion rather than reason. And I love her because she accepts both sides of me -- and, if I may so speak, shares them herself.

In my life I strive for balance, and that includes a balance between emotion and reason. Sometimes logic and reason are the right tools for the job, and sometimes love and empathy are. I'm old enough that I've come to trust my instincts about it, and while they do sometimes steer me wrong, those occasions are fewer and fewer.

Trust yourself, and let the scales balance naturally for you, D.

Let the truth of love be lighted
Let the love of truth shine clear
Sensibility
Armed with sense and liberty
With the heart and mind united in a single perfect sphere

Well said. It's a balance.

My wife has a wonderful ability to laugh at absurdity. She knocks herself out sometimes, just belly-laughing about how life just strikes her in some crazy way. My default response to such things is to Not Be Amused. At. All. But the problem is that these things are often not even remotely actionable. You can't do anything about them. Laughter is one path -- and a very good one -- to acceptance of what you can't change. So I traded in my I SEE DUMB PEOPLE tee shirt with its implied supercilious disdain for, and frustration with, the Unenlightened ... and have learned to quit avoiding the realization that I suck just as much, in my own special way, as others do. And lo and behold, thanks to my lovely wife, I've learned to laugh at human foibles, and by extension my own foibles. Not as readily or fully as her (yet) but I'm working on it. It provides me with a useful response to things I could only sputter and fume about before. Is it logical? No. But it's mature. And one does grow SO tired of being perpetually frustrated.

[The Grand Nudger]

For those who are of a  "spiritual but not religious" nature, please define spiritual.
No snippage of previous posts please; I'm looking for a definition of 'spiritual'.

Generally speaking, people who do not follow a religious tradition and may not even believe in gods as entities - but do feel or believe in some sort of inneffable, commonly supernatural, "x" or spirit permeating the world around them.  Any animist, most neopagans, assorted shamans and fortune tellers and ritualists fit this descriptor.  All deists fit. Some theists - but it's a stretch on that count.

: of, relating to, consisting of, or affecting the spirit : incorporeal spiritual needs
2
a : of or relating to sacred matters spiritual songs
b : ecclesiastical rather than lay or temporal spiritual authority lords spiritual
3
: concerned with religious values
4
: related or joined in spirit our spiritual home his spiritual heir
5
a : of or relating to supernatural beings or phenomena
b : of, relating to, or involving spiritualism : spiritualistic

It's a big tent, lol.

[JackRussell]

For those who are of a  "spiritual but not religious" nature, please define spiritual.
No snippage of previous posts please; I'm looking for a definition of 'spiritual'.

Generally speaking, people who do not follow a religious tradition and may not even believe in gods as entities - but do feel or believe in some sort of inneffable, commonly supernatural, "x" or spirit permeating the world around them.  Any animist, most neopagans, assorted shamans and fortune tellers and ritualists fit this descriptor.  All deists fit. Some theists - but it's a stretch on that count.

Ok, fine, but why should any rational person accept this too. Wonder and the numinous as experiential can be understood perfectly naturally as well.

[mordant]

Generally speaking, people who do not follow a religious tradition and may not even believe in gods as entities - but do feel or believe in some sort of inneffable, commonly supernatural, "x" or spirit permeating the world around them.  Any animist, most neopagans, assorted shamans and fortune tellers and ritualists fit this descriptor.  All deists fit. Some theists - but it's a stretch on that count.

Ok, fine, but why should any rational person accept this too. Wonder and the numinous as experiential can be understood perfectly naturally as well.

I completely agree that there is no more reason to accept one supernatural concept over another, even if no deities are on offer. The supernatural is not a coherent concept, much less a supportable one. "Wonder and the numinous" can indeed be experienced without resorting to the supernatural or subscribing to "spirit permeating the world around you".

On the other hand, I wonder if it's necessarily bad to "fool yourself" provided you understand that's what you're doing. I for example have great fondness for coffee but for various reasons it's bad for me physically. On my daily walk, I frequently promise myself that I'll stop at the local Dunkin Donuts for a latte when I get to that point on my walk -- and then I break that promise to myself when I get there, telling myself that I'm almost home anyway and I'm kind of hot and would just rather have a glass of ice water. I just tell myself different things and my dimbulb subconscious believes it, even if I know I'm lying. This is a well known fact, that your subconscious is terribly gullible and responds to commands -- even commands of your own conscious self -- quite well. You only have to be willing to personify it a little and talk to it as if it's a separate being.

It is not my style to get through my life existentially in that way, but I can see how it could work. Jedi mind tricks seem like cheating, but in my old age I just don't give a fig anymore ... whatever works. If I needed to kid myself about gods or afterlives, I suppose I could. I wonder if many people don't do that anyway, even if they won't admit to it. I know so many people who hold their faith so loosely that it seems totally ad-hoc and utterly self-contradictory. If you gently press them, they'll admit it -- yet, they persist in it. Why? I can only presume that it works for them. [shrug]

[The Grand Nudger]

Generally speaking, people who do not follow a religious tradition and may not even believe in gods as entities - but do feel or believe in some sort of inneffable, commonly supernatural, "x" or spirit permeating the world around them.  Any animist, most neopagans, assorted shamans and fortune tellers and ritualists fit this descriptor.  All deists fit. Some theists - but it's a stretch on that count.

Ok, fine, but why should any rational person accept this too. Wonder and the numinous as experiential can be understood perfectly naturally as well.

Rational people accept a great many things.....plenty of which aren't rational.  We have one in thread who feels what they feel.  There's no attempt to rationalize it, or claim that it's rational.  Ultimately there may be rational reasons for such a feeling but that doesn;t mean that the feeling, itself, is rational.  We do this all the time - get things right fro the wrong reasons, or wrong for the right reasons. Sure, some underlying process might conform to a standard of rationality but it doesn't mean that the specifics of whatever it is that is believed are, themselves, rational.

While we can, for example, say that the numinous has a rational explantion...who is using whatever that explanation is in their experience of it? Surely not OP. Often enough, reason-as-employed by human beings is a happy or unhappy accident...and, for some, it's both all at once. I'd rather not know that my children are skilled manipulators. I -do- know that they are, but I still can't bring myself to feel that way about them when I look in their wittle faces. Similarly, I like to assume and expect the best of adults around me.....but tell me, how rational is that? Why should any rational person accept the decency and dignity of man?


@Mord
There's nothing incoherent about the supernatural..it's too nonspecific a category to claim incoherence...it just doesn't exist.

[JackRussell]

Ok, fine, but why should any rational person accept this too. Wonder and the numinous as experiential can be understood perfectly naturally as well.

Rational people accept a great many things.....plenty of which aren't rational.  We have one in thread who feels what they feel.  There's no attempt to rationalize it, or claim that it's rational.  Ultimately there may be rational reasons for such a feeling but that doesn;t mean that the feeling, itself, is rational.  We do this all the time - get things right fro the wrong reasons, or wrong for the right reasons.  Sure, some underlying process might conform to a standard of rationality but it doesn't mean that the specifics of whatever it is that is believed are, themselves, rational.  

While we can, for example, say that the numinous has a rational explantion...who is using whatever that explanation is in their experience of it?  Surely not OP.  Often enough, reason-as-employed by human beings is a happy or unhappy accident...and, for some, it's both all at once.  I'd rather not know that my children are skilled manipulators.  I -do- know that they are, but I still can't bring myself to feel that way about them when I look in their wittle faces.

Did man go to the moon? Can that be evidenced? That was numinous to me , we stepped toward the stars, but irrational fools disbelieve this.  Were does one draw the line?

[The Grand Nudger]

Did man go to the moon? Can that be evidenced? That was numinous to me , we stepped toward the stars, but irrational fools disbelieve this.  Were does one draw the line?

Moon hoaxers are odd birds, aren't they?  It's one of those things where there seems to be no specific impetus to claim an elaborate conspiracy - and yet.