I also don't want you to shut up about it, Steph. I think especially this kind of conversation gets touchy, but I hope you know that I like and respect you enough to come to it openly and honestly.

I went away for an hour to finish an essay, and there were 100 new posts on religion. Wow. Interesting stuff to read!

Calli brings up the point that dismissing religion as magical thinking is implicitly dismissive to magic believers as well.

I was going to say something along those lines earlier, till I realised I didn't know quite how to express it. But, having several close friends who are pagans, I do dislike the use of such beliefs as a go-to dismissal of non-atheistic positions.

Sadly, I've also seen religious faith bring my mother down through troubled times. She honestly believed until she slipped into her coma that she didn't beat her ovarian cancer because she didn't pray hard enough.

I know that form of faith, from my years of being told I must have 'demon possession' because of mental illness, and the like. It doesn't have any personal hold over me anymore, but anytime someone offers to pray for my 'healing' (by which they usually mean praying that I'll stop undermining their belief that socially constructed norms are something that everyone can rely on forever), I get very pissed off. It's not too common in my extremely diverse church community, but I still come across variations on this theme. When feeling bold enough, I respond to such people that I'll be praying for them to realise that life is varied, non-standard and unpredictable, in all the diversity that God created. (Although too often I just mumble 'thanks' and limp away as quick as I can.)

I mean, I'm the daughter of two people who were so hurt by the Christian Church that they gave up on Christianity entirely, one becoming a Buddhist and the other a humanist. I know that Christians can be frustrating as hell (semi-pun intended). For me, that just makes me more determined to find a way to 'do' Christianity in a way that respects others' beliefs or lack of belief, while also being true to who I am. This is no small undertaking. Especially when I fell in love with an atheist from a very different culture than mine. But it's all good for my faith. Eventually!

You can all back away from the crazy lady now.

You express it more clearly and coherently than I could. Oh, and I too avoid petitional prayer, almost to the point of ridiculousness. To be honest, I don't always believe it has any effect, in any way we can understand. For me, the ritual of prayer (it's very ritualistic, in my form of Anglicanism, which is important to me) is far more about God changing my thinking than it is about me trying to talk to God. I get a bit nervous of approaching the deity too directly. I'm supposed to be trying, though, for confirmation class. Hmm, really ought to be doing more of that before I actually get confirmed.

Edited several times. Must learn to read before posting.

This is pretty freaking brilliant. Did you come up with it by yourself?

Yeah. I used to listen to music and sing along as a way to de-stress and calm myself down, and then I noticed that I always started by having to think a lot about the phrasing and messing up a lot of things, but by the time I got to the end of an album, it was much less difficult, and the effect would carry over into regular speaking for at least a little while. It doesn't last long, though, and in order to keep it going for a little while, I usually have to kind of run the songs through my head while breathing as if I were singing them, until it's my turn to talk.

I used to recite the Lord's prayer often at the appopriate time and place. I was never praying. Just going along with the flow until I got ornery/old/resilient enough to stand there silently.

This is where I see religious practice being very close to magical practice. Standing with a bunch of people chanting the Lord's Prayer is no different, to my mind, to people standing in a circle chanting an invocation to the Goddess. A power is being invoked, and it may go nowhere resembling the ear of a diety, but directed purpose and awareness is there.

Yeah, I really hope no one is feeling piled on or not listened to in this.

In this sense, belief is acceptance of something as true that is unseen and unprovable;

And religion is the only thing I can think of where the general thinking is "and that's okay." Regardless of your take on why that is or if it's good, bad, or indifferent, I think it's at the heart of why this conversation is so hard to have. Because most of the words we use to discuss things that are not or cannot be proven or demonstrated, and yet are asked to take as fact (or real or something non-judgy, please) do have a negative connotation, in varying degrees. So then we try to shift them over to this discussion and things that are meant neutrally or questioningly come across as far more pointed and direct than they ought, on both ends, I think.

I have a friend who has a bit of a stutter. It's usually only around people she doesn't know well, but it ends up being a cycle of her not knowing people well and not talking because of the stutter and not getting to know people because she's not talking, and it's a damn shame 'cause she's awesome. I may mention this to her, if that's ok.

Standing with a bunch of people chanting the Lord's Prayer is no different, to my mind, to people standing in a circle chanting an invocation to the Goddess. A power is being invoked, and it may go nowhere resembling the ear of a diety, but directed purpose and awareness is there.

Absolutely. I don't think there's any difference, either. The communal and ritual aspects are the most important parts for me.

I think it's at the heart of why this conversation is so hard to have. Because most of the words we use to discuss things that are not or cannot be proven or demonstrated, and yet are asked to take as fact (or real or something non-judgy, please) do have a negative connotation, in varying degrees. So then we try to shift them over to this discussion and things that are meant neutrally or questioningly come across as far more pointed and direct than they ought, on both ends, I think.

This is a very good point.

Ritual sacrifice with pie.

Oh, and speaking of prayer, the email list from my synagogue is driving me nuts. There are certain prayers that are supposed to be said as a community, not as individuals, and what counts as "community" in an Orthodox synagogue is ten Jewish men. (For various complicated and boring reasons, the synagogue I usually go to is an Orthodox one, even though I don't really consider myself Orthodox.) The past week, someone has sent out an email to the mailing list each morning telling us how many people were at the morning service. No commentary, no explanation for why it's being sent out, just, each morning, something like, "At today's Shacharit service, there were nine men, three women, one boy, and two girls present at 7. A tenth man arrived at 7:15. The service begins at 7." Or, "At today's Shacharit service, there were eight men, two women, and one boy." One of the prayers that needs to be said as a community is a prayer for the dead that people recite every day for a year after a close relative dies. It's generally considered a good thing to go to the morning service whenever you can, even if you don't have a particular reason to go, so that the people in mourning will be able to say their prayer properly. And these emails are clearly meant to remind people of that, and to try to get more people coming so that there will be ten men each day. But they don't say that. They don't say anything. Just a daily report of how many people were at synagogue, and letting us decide what to do with that information.