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To: alt.magick.tyagi,talk.religion.misc,alt.atheism,sci.philosophy.meta,alt.religion.wicca From: tyagi@houseofkaos.abyss.com (nagasiva) Subject: MScratch: Religion without Gods? Date: 23 Dec 1996 15:10:00 -0800 [from alt.satanism: "Mr. Scratch"] On 19 Dec 1996 dwest64054@aol.com wrote: > From my old fundie days as a Nazarine, I still find it hard to believe > that people can have a "religion" that does not believe in a divine > presence. Atheism, and Humanism are not religions, from what I learned as > an adolescence, as they do not have room for a "god" in their belief > system. Hence, they are more "ethical" groups, non-religious. Hence, I > would also put any "pagan" group into same category, if it did not have a > god/dess higher power. But, that's just the way I was taught, and think > it still has some validity. This seems like an obvious conclusion, but the more and more I learn about people and the way they believe, the more less I have become to agree with such statements. Ever hear the old Hindu tale of the atheist who swore there was no divine godhood? Everyone condemned him, claiming he would never be united with the godhood, because he spent so much time attacking the idea of godhood itself. When he died, however, he stood alongside the holy men in first meeting the divine, because in life, he had devoted more time just /thinking/ about the divine in order to denounce it than most had given in seeking it. Additionally, one of the things that interested me in Buddhism was that in its original Hinayana form, it was almost atheistic in its approach to the existence of gods, in the afterlife, in the very notion of the existence of divinity. Yet you would probably consider Buddhism a religion. As time goes on, I find that religion is less and less about whether or not you believe in gods, and more and more about if you believe in /anything/. Certain ideas attempt to encompass the essence of the universe and the nature of mankind whether there is happens to be some disembodied ghostie or sprite present or not. I have met godless communists that sought their salvation in "speaking up" for the downtrodden prolotariat. I would say that they were "religious" about their beliefs, and indeed Marx and Lenin considered conventional religion to be in competition with their own doctrine (thus highlighting the similarities). I have met atheist physicists and astronomers whose scientific theories on the nature of matter, time and energy were as mind-boggling as anything the hash-smoking Saddhus were able to cough up (no pun intended). In fact, I have come to consider the Big Bang (what most people mistakenly consider "factual" and "secular") to be nothing more than our own 20th century creation myth, on par with Genesis 1:1 or any other creation myth that we now consider "quaint" -- an attempt to tease out a possible source of it all from our limited evidence. (As a side note, a couple of years ago I wrote an account of the Big Bang in retro, mythical terms in order to illustrate this point to others). I consider this religion. I have an interest in the sociological phenomenon surrounding UFO "abductees" and "witnesses": in the world of science, most of us know and accept that the world is not teeming with angels and devils. Yet we still have the impulse to express our hopes and fears in this externalized manner, so we now have the old lights in the sky and tormenting monster story retold: these spirits have been stripped of their wings and halos/horns, and refitted in a suit of super-duper technological hardware to make it more compatible with our accepted "scientific" cosmology. I can discern no difference between this and religion. Besides, if you ask many pagans, you will find that a great many of them /don't/ believe in a literal god/dess either. They might not say it as such, but they take a weird kind of pseudoagnostic attitude toward the literal existence of beings that would have been shocking to the ancient pagans. Many of them will tell you that man collectively creates and sustains the gods. On a more subtle level, look to their attitude toward the Christian YHWH or the Christian version of Satan; "those aren't our gods, we don't believe in them". As if, if someone believed that gods were real at all, they would get to pick and choose which was real or not. Are atheist/agnostic Satanists "religious"? I think the answer is yes, in a very real manner of speaking. > Dave Mr. Scratch -- see http://www.hollyfeld.org/~tyagi/nagasiva.html and call: 408/2-666-SLUG!!! ---- (emailed replies may be posted) ---- CC public replies to email ---- * * * Asphalta Cementia Metallica Polymera Coyote La Cuckaracha Humana * * *
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