and there are no athiests signing up to the UK’s biggest atheist charity in the middle of a terrifying pandemic.
So, rather than clog up the coronavirus thread with an argument about religion, lets put it here.
How is your faith (or lack of) holding up during the pandemic?
Is it possible that people see joining a humanist organization as a luxury in the face of a global recession/depression and not at all reflective of their faith or lack thereof?
The pandemic has no impact whatever on my lack of faith. There have been plenty of pandemics before, as I have known for years, so it doesn’t even slightly alter my understanding or interpretation of the way the world is. It’s just unfortunate.
To kick off, without the comforted weighted blanket of belief to protect me, all i have are science and statistics, and videos of models of breathing and sneezes and coughs and my high risk status around heart disease, stents and blood types and gender. From that aspect, perhaps I lose out.
My dad is 6,500 miles away in ICU in a coma, on a ventilator and hooked up to a dialysis machine (he wanted first dibs on a ventilator so had a heart attack a week ago), but even then my conversations with the family out there annoy me somewhat over the amount of time they are spending praying (or talking about praying) for him, which is lovely, but from my pov pointless.
At least I dont have to ask questions on why a supreme being would do this to me/us/everyone.
No affect on me - if anything in sparks hope that people will start believing in science again. (Not that it’s mutually exclusive from religion, mind you).
I actually just resigned from the Church og Denmark last week. I’ve been meaning to do so for years, but didn’t get past the (admittedly trivial) paperwork until now.
While PWK’s title was clickbait bullshit, let’s take a moment and appreciate the symbol used by the US Gov for an atheist’s tombstone.
My belief in a pantheon of whimsical yet capricious gods that generally love to fuck with the humans, like the Greeks but with less actual fucking of humans, remains unchanged.
I’m one of those weird atheists who goes to church. So far, I appreciate what my current and former church communities are doing to keep us apprised of everyone’s situation.
Regarding my own faith, much of it came out of my experience with grief after my mother’s death and is relevant here. I have faith that by getting up and living each day I’ll find hope.
The sun was kind enough to come out of the clouds as I was typing that.
Something tells me Dr. Manhattan would not have approved.
Universalist?
And like god, Dr. Manhattan is also make-believe.
Hey-oh!
Nah, universalist theology ain’t my cup of tea. If I really had to pick a denomination, I’d go with Presbylutheranism.
Anyways, It’s partly participant observation, partly a habit from living/working in communities where attendance carried cultural clout, and partly a periodic reminder that atheism is in fact valuable to me.
I’ve found myself wishing for something that told me this all made sense in some way, and muttering Jesus a lot when reading stories about existing or coming collapses. It’s incredibly overwhelming to be empathetic about the despair doctors and patients go through.
But in the end, I found my solution in psychology. Specifically, stop consuming so much about it, life is what it is and there’s nothing I can do. Other than locking myself home, washing my hands and not spitting.
If some Jews can still believe in God after the Holocaust, a silly little pandemic isn’t going to shake their faith. For me, I’m more in the “I appreciate the philosophy and the morals, but don’t buy the supernatural stuff” camp. I do stuff with my synagogue, like teach classes, but I rarely if ever attend a minyan or much less shabbat services. As others note, it is what it is, and I tend to see the universe as a giant collection of things that happen randomly in toto but specifically according to patterns or rules we can sometimes figure out.
I appreciate some of the moral teaching of the Episcopal church and the community (similar but not quite the same as the culturall clout mentioned by @Carto) and am officially a member. On the other hand I consider myself an agnostic and this pandemic is not changing that fact.
Fascinating! You have to resign?
My (Catholic) faith isn’t shaken by the pandemic, but it evokes a lot of bracing questions and examinations of some of the great questions of fallenness and suffering, and solidarity with those who suffer, that come up in these situations. So I think that’s useful, and while the answers are anything but crystal clear, it usually ends up enriching my faith a bit.
Atheist. Unaffected. If anything, a pandemic strengthens my non-belief.
