Um... I still feel kinda new around here and I don't know if this post needs to come with some sort of trigger warning - these are big, complex issues and you appear to be dealing with some challenges in your life that I don't really know much about in detail. So I don't know if my take on it is going to be helpful or not. But I'm willing to try. I'm going to trust in the staff to make sure I'm not overstepping a line here... but anyway I feel like I might have something useful to say on this topic having gone through a lot of soul searching myself over the last few years which also involved exploration of spirituality and religion.
I think the idea that religion was an early attempt by human beings to explain what they saw around them in nature holds together well: the concept of a "god" provided explanations for things like disease, earthquakes, death, birth... but it was created in a time before we understood that germ theory explains disease, tectonic plates explain earthquakes, there are many biological processes that cause ageing, and even before we understood the connection between a romp under the sheets and 9 months later a birth... We now have much more information and we have more accurate explanations for what we see around us. Whether that improved understanding is
useful for us is another, somewhat separate topic for discussion.
Daniel Dennett did some work quite a while ago exploring whether religion (and more generically a belief in a higher power) was an evolutionary phenomenon: as I recall his hypothesis was that humans are more likely to survive long enough to reproduce if they are not depressed. The notion of a higher power that has a purpose for us and that we don't die but instead move on to some other form of existence was useful. It gave people a reason to get out of bed in the morning and the psychological strength to endure life when it became challenging. I'm not sure he ever got as far as devising a useful model. At the time when I was following his work, he was just exploring the idea and doing research at Harvard College I think, and hadn't reached many substantial conclusions.
Albert Camus viewed the belief in a "god" as one of three potential responses to the realisation that the universe is indifferent towards us. He wrote that we can choose to end our lives (physical suicide), believe in a god (philosophical suicide) or perhaps explore if there is a third option - and he proposed that "defiance" was the only thing left. At the risk of grossly oversimplifying his entire body of work... the universe is indifferent to our existence but we can choose to be happy with our situation
anyway. In his work The Myth of Sisyphus he suggested we need to picture Sisyphus happy as he walks back down the mountain to begin rolling his rock back up - again, and again, and again. It reminds me of the crude and somewhat flippant saying "when life gives you lemons, make lemonade." In other words, satisfaction can always be derived from whatever situation we find ourselves in, although there is also an undeniable and constant conflict between the indifference of the universe and the human psychological need for something more.
None of the above relates to my personal opinions, it's just background information that I found helpful when trying to figure out how I was going to deal with my own despair and depression.
= = =
So now moving on to my personal perspective,
which may or may not be well founded...
I am relentlessly focused on fact vs fiction. I want to understand what the facts are before I start making decisions about my life. It feels plain wrong to me to base big life decisions on fiction. This has led me to conclude that I cannot make decisions based on the idea that any god actually exists, because it's clear (to me) that no god exists. However, I'm also driven to constantly assess whether I've made a mistake. And in turn this led me to attend Quaker meetings some years ago. I went to meeting every Sunday for about 2 years. At no point did I believe that the christian god actually existed. But in UK Quaker meetings this is not even spoken about (I hear that this is different in the USA for example but I have no experience of it).
We would sit in a circle, in silence, contemplating whatever we personally wanted or needed to contemplate. Every now and then someone would feel a desire to express something and they would stand up and say whatever they wanted without judgement. In the Quaker community no-one has the authority to define christianity or interpret the bible for others. The focus was very much on a personal relationship with the universe - with only some very broad principles of guidance referred to as testimonies:
"These testimonies are to integrity, equality, simplicity, community, stewardship of the Earth, and peace. They arise from an inner conviction and challenge our normal ways of living. They exist in spiritually-led actions rather than in rigid written forms. They are not imposed in any way and they require us to search for ways in which we can live them out for ourselves. Our commitment to non-violence in thought, word and deed is based on the idea that all human beings have something of the divine with us. This idea can be described, in the words of founder George Fox (1624-1691), as ... “seeking the inner light” in each person."
Source:
Quaker Values | QUNO
Eventually I stopped attending Quaker meetings because I felt it had served its purpose in my life (and as an aside, looking back on it, the social interaction at the weekly meetings and other social events was super uncomfortable for me - which I can now see is related to my autism - so actually attending meetings was very difficult even though I found them valuable).
Since then I've explored humanist principles in detail. I'm a member of the Center for Inquiry:
CFI: Center for Inquiry and their regular publication "Free Inquiry" is full of thought-provoking articles:
Home | Free Inquiry
I don't see any conflict between being humanist and those Quaker values. And I don't feel there's any need at all to believe in a god of any sort in order to find spiritual satisfaction. A lot of it is about accepting the world/universe/our own situation for what it is - nothing more, nothing less - non-judgementally. And then deriving value from
how we live rather than
what we do.
On the other hand, I'm still full of despair and depression, so maybe everything I just said is more interesting than it is useful...
