I am Ganesh, an Indian atheist and I don’t eat beef. It’s not like that I have a religious reason to do that, but after all those years seeing cows as peaceful animals and playing and growing up with them in a village, I doubt if I ever will be able to eat beef. I wasn’t raised very religious, I didn’t go to temple everyday and read Gita every evening unlike most muslims who are somewhat serious about their religion, my family has this watered down religion (which has it’s advantages).
But yeah, not eating beef is a moral issue I deal with. I mean, I don’t care that I don’t eat beef, but the fact that I eat pork and chicken but not beef seems to me to be weird. So, is there any religious practice that you guys follow to this day?
edit: I like religious music, religious temples (Churches, Gurudwara’s, Temples & Mosques in Iran), religious paintings and art sometimes. I know for a fact that the only art you could produce is those days was indeed religious and the greatest artists needed to make something religious to be funded, that we will never know what those artists would have produced in the absence of religion, but yeah, religious art is good nonetheless.
Still love me some good Gospel music.
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Jew/ish or a Muslim? I don’t do alcohol either (because it’s bad, not because I have a moral problem with that)
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Yeah choosing to abstain from eating certain animals for moral reasons (dogs/cats/cows/horses) and not others (pigs/chickens/fish) is definitely weird. Though the majority of people in western society fall into this category, you just moved one more animal across the boundary due to normalization. If you were brought up with pigs, chickens, and fish you’d probably abstain from those too.
The real question to ask though is despite normalization, what’s actually the right thing to do? Is it actually okay that some people eat dogs, cats, and cows? Or is it wrong to do this?
People should put more effort into reconciling this dissonance, because slaughter and oppression is not a matter we should leave up to the normalization of society to decide. Society has countless times normalized immoral things.
Ex-muslim here. I am not practicing most of its rituals other than zakat, as I feel like its one of those act that transcends any beliefs.
I read about it once and thought why couldn’t I give back at least as much, even without religious justification. Perhaps ironically in this context, part of the amount goes to my local atheist charity.
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What is zakat?
Not OP and not a Muslim but it seems it’s a ‘commandment’ on charity to the poor.
Ty!
Every year, out of all of your things that are not necessary like jewelery/saving or other non essential items, you are supposed to donate 2.5% of it, or equivalent in money, to a poor person.
Interestingly this would mean that a true muslim will probably never become a multi-billionaire.
If the amount is 2.5 %/yr of non-essentials, there is still lots of ways one could make money significantly faster with a good business strategy and lots of luck, and have a probability of eventually reaching a net worth in the billions. However, there’s a difference between following the letter of the “law” and its spirit.
Jews call that sadaka. it’s one of the ideas I remember fondly from my early years
I’ve always felt the serenity prayer was good life advice.
Yes, yes it is.
Christmas for sure because it’s fun and there’s good food and smells and all kinds of stuff. Beyond that, no not really.
I slowly begin to rename it to winter solstice. Also makes it easier to incorporate the red clothed dude and stuff. Despite he doesn’t make sense in any constellation, but the kids live it the weird way it is.
Christmas isn’t in the winter solstice though…
It’s pretty close (Usually Dec 20 or 21), and some versions of the holidays that were merged together to form today’s Christmas were indeed celebrated on the solstice.
It is close (pretty sure it’s 22nd), but I’m not sure there’s evidence that co-opting a pagan festival is what happened. It is a common assertion though.
I don’t need evidence, out just moves the the Christmas in the way we celebrate it and that hasn’t much left of the Christian Christmas away from the Christianity, but towards something I really appreciate: days getting longer again.
Every December I start practicing classical guitar arrangements of Christmas music, just like I always have.
i like hanging the bit about jesus telling people to respect gender divergence over people’s heads
o where
I wasn’t really raised into religion - my mom was a believer (Honestly not sure if she still is, I’ve picked up hints that may have changed), but she never once went to or brought me to church, we never talked about religion, etc. I think she got enough of that stuff when she was a kid.
I do like to go all-out on decorating for Christmas - just last year I spent a whole lot of time setting up and coding my own tree full of individually addressable RGB LEDs, in addition to all the other decorating on the interior of the place.
Despite that I still love saying “Happy Holidays” to anyone who gets bothered by that phrase. 😁
This seem to work on an assumption that people have a religion before becoming athiest/agnostic. I never did. My birth certificate says Church of England as that’s the default here unless your parents ask for something else. However they never took me to church or raised me in a religious manner, I had an entirely secular upbringing so there’s no elements of Religon to hang onto.
This is probably slightly tangential, but after leaving a very dogmatic, Christian upbringing, I dabbled in the New Atheist Thing but have since come to realize religion and belief is on a two dimensional axes.
On the first axis, you have dogma, or a core set of beliefs or religious doctrine. High or low dogma. Your classic fundamentalists of any stripe are over here. Evangelical Christians, fundamentalist Islam. And yes even some strains of atheism can be relatively high dogma. On the lower end of the dogma scale you have agnostics, many atheists, some types of new age spirituality, and even some types of organized religion like Unitarianism or Buddhism.
On the second axis is humanism, or the relishing and participation in people, culture and acceptance of people or ideas that do not conform to the doctrine. High on the humanism scale would be literal secular humanists, and other faiths that prioritize people more than dogma.
Eventually, someone raised in a high dogma/low humanism religion might eventually learn there are some faiths that are relatively high humanism, even with a low or relatively high dogma score.
Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.
It sounds like you don’t understand what atheist or agnostic actually mean.
Yes an atheist believes there is basically no evidence there is a God while an agnostic believes it’s an unknowable or unanswerable questions.
The issue is if an atheist adheres to some dogma (eg all religious people are bad and dogmatic, people who don’t read the same books are ignorant) then it becomes a relatively high dogmatic belief system, for that person.
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I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I don’t buy into all the soul mumbo-jumbo, but it makes for good stories. Also, the Catholics made some good music back in the day.
Yeah, about that…
Catholics used to castrate the choir boys so their voices wouldn’t change.
yeah, they needed a high voice and they didn’t know about Helium back then.
I’m sorry, I hope you’re being sarcastic.
Are you not aware of the extensive history the Catholic Church has of molesting and abusing children?
https://www.npr.org/2021/07/01/1012100926/graves-found-at-new-site-canadian-indigenous-group-says
I could look up a thousand articles and still probably wouldn’t scratch the surface.
Can we discuss atheism without turning every thread into a rehashing of Religions’ Atrocities.
It’s not just history, ask the current pope. He knew and protected molesters. And gets away with it.
damn, yes another thing I like is the religious music. not only of Hindus but muslims have some nice songs as well. My muslim friend was laughing after I was humming a quite nice muslim prayer song (Hindi), long ago, but that moment was quite funny.
I am a non-theist Norse pagan and have been a Norse pagan since I was single digits in age. I was raised by a Catholic mother (her mother was Irish Catholic and her father was Roman Catholic), my father’s mother was a Mennonite. I was not raised religiously, but i still have Catholic guilt, and use religious curses.
Longshot, initials SR?
“Norse pagan since I was single digits in age” can’t be very many people, is all
My initials? No, sorry.
Huh. Well then, you’re certainly not the only one.
How do you get into norse paganism?
I started with reading books on Norse mythology, then realized the gods in it were no more or less valid than any other god. There is a Norse paganism community on lemmy (I still have not yet figured out how to link communities)
