religiousandareligiousidentity

[I contributed this to the "Theism+ AND Atheism+" thread on rpg.net's Tangency (registration required to view), which even considering it's a gaming and fantasy site's "other topics" forum, has some of the best society/culture/politic kind of discussion I've seen online (which may say more about the sorry state of the web itself or my experience of it than it says about Tangency), and is remarkably polite and nice by internet standards. Like most of what I write here, it could use another round of editing, but here it is anyway.]

The word 'atheist' technically applies to me. I try to treat these kinds of labels as descriptors rather than an identity.
My family were what was commonly called "Jack" Mormons, though that church now recommends the term "less active." We were irregular attendees at the local ward (Mo-speak for "parish"), friendly with the neighbors, participants in several ward activities, generally within Mormon culture, but not particularly devout. (My parents have told me at one point in my childhood they withdrew us from church activity for awhile because I had seemed to be taking the church far too seriously.) Of my immediate family, my mom's the only one who could still be called religious, and that still in a culture and community sense rather than a belief sense, though she is a theist in some sense I haven't inquired into. The house had several books of science and of folklore (my dad's an engineer, mom's a social worker with a background in English), and things like space and volcanoes and poisonous snakes and heroic stories are awesome. I probably knew the Greek myths better than any of the Christian myths, possibly excepting the Christmas story. I still credit Carl Sagan's Cosmos as the definitive seed of my worldview. The universe is an amazing place.

I've been a part of the local nontheist community* for a number of years now. We've been growing into a proper community, now engaging in charity work, and trying to promote what I think of as a revitalization of the old Freethought movement of the late 19th/early 20th century.

My views come from both epistemological agnosticism and ideological antiauthoritarianism. Our knowledge of truth is limited, I don't trust revelation or authority as sources of knowledge, and the empirical methods developed by science have proved the best so far at refining something close to real knowledge. I see the pursuit of understanding what the universe is and why as sort of the point of all the deep cosmic stuff. Because community and charity and goodwill can be made anywhere humans choose to make them, they're not really the test of value of religious ideas.
The antiauthoritarianism comes in because I find the idea of a universe ruled from the top down both morally and aesthetically unpleasing. The idea that a sufficiently powerful cosmic being could be able to make morality be whatever that being commanded it to be is actually horrific, no different from a world of might makes right, yet it seems to be the only morality some religious people claim to understand. Aesthetically and morally, I love the idea of emergent complexity and self-organization from the bottom up, I love the idea that these principles arise in physics, biology, chemistry, even political and social organization. I think anything close to genuine morality has to be built on the empathy among beings experiencing the universe, not on the will of an entity commanding the universe.

I tend to think most religious people are in it for the community participation, rather than being firmly committed to doctrines. For all that Joseph Smith called the Catholic Church the whore of Babylon, those two churches are very similar in that they actually strive for a single global organization with leaders on high directing groups below, where most other religions in the world are more regional and modular. Meeting with ex-Mormons has shown me that the particular experience of Mormon culture varies from family to family. Mormon families differ in how much deference they believe must be paid to church authority, and I expect the same is true for Catholic families, but for those families who do follow, the authority structure of the church pushes a more singular experience, and emotional pressure to conform is very high. I know a lot of ex-Mormons worried about the social and emotional costs if their families find out about their doubts, and my antiauthoritarian sentiment leads me to regard that as a form of tyranny.

I think the Cosmological Argument (that to have something rather than nothing requires an intelligent cause) is persuasive to many people. There's probably a reason for something rather than nothing, but I don't think any kind of mind must necessarily be involved in that reason. That said, I can see deism, pantheism, and panentheism as somewhat kindred worldviews, and if someone convinced me one of those made more sense than naturalism, very little else of my worldview would need be altered. Deism, pantheism, and panentheism aren't inherently incompatible with what empirical methodological naturalism (science) has helped us know about the universe.

In terms of ultimate meaning and value, well, it's true that a godless universe doesn't offer meaning as a given, but I think something meaningful can be derived. Carl Sagan said, "we are a way for the universe to know itself." I think any attempt to find value in existence has to rest on that: our conscious experience of the universe. We're in this together and if we can learn to value our own experience of the universe, and recognize others' experience of the universe as equally valid and valuable, morality and meaning can be built on that. Bottoms up.

*(Including AoU, UFS, HoU, SHIFT, SHAFT, though the websites are probably less up-to-date than the respective facebook pages, lazy as we are.)