3:54am July 7, 2013

➸ Janna's weird crap: actualcanadianfemmesherlock: Not all religious people use religion as...

Not all religious people use religion as a crutch!!!!!

Condescending statements about how even though you choose to deal with your problems on your own you respect my need for religion ARE NOT COOL.

In case you haven’t noticed there are lots of fucked up…

Plus not all forms of religion and spirituality are even in conflict with atheism, but that’s a whole other conversation. Whether or not the religion in question is monotheist, polytheist, pantheist, atheist, lots of the many other things religions can be, or any combination of these things (you’d be surprised), acting all superior and condescending about it is asinine.

Also acting like, for instance, Christians all believe in a big man with a beard sitting in the sky, is displaying a huge ignorance of what religion means to most people. I get really fed up listening to some atheists who oversimplify religion to make it easier to ridicule, and then refuse to believe anyone who says “it’s not like that". See also: saying religion when you mean Christianity, treating all religions as monotheistic (or theistic at all), reducing all religious belief to a caricature that practically nobody except little kids actually believes.

And then there are the ones who tell me I’ve only had spiritual experiences because I’m epileptic. As if I can’t tell the difference between a random seizure that may create certain expansive emotional experiences, and a deep and meaningful experience brought about by years of grueling spiritual work, which corresponds to a lasting, deep change in my character.

Hint: The kind of experience you get from seizures (or drugs, or magnetic stimulation) doesn’t correspond to all that work, doesn’t create a lasting a deep change in the fundamental way your mind works, and… while someone who hasn’t had both kinds of experience may have a really hard time telling the difference, “spiritual experiences" brought on by random electrical activity in the brain are just the emotions without connection to the things that normally brought them about.

Seizures can cause uncontrollable crying and sadness, too, and nobody tries to claim that this means that grief from your best friend dying isn’t real, is “just a seizure", just because the emotion is the same on the surface. Spiritual experiences come with certain emotions too, and that means the capacity for those emotions exists in the brain and can be triggered in the absence of the situation that normally triggers them. That doesn’t mean that the situation that normally triggers them doesn’t exist. Seizures causing ANY emotion can fool people into thinking there’s a reason behind that emotion, because human brains hunt for reasons. But… yeah. Only with spiritual emotions does everyone pretend they only exist when triggered by things like seizures.

Don’t tell me my epilepsy causes me to be spiritual. Just don’t. There’s a difference. You may not believe there’s an actual reason for spiritual experiences, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay to run around reducing a profound part of people’s lives to a disease.

I’m not saying you have to agree with people who are religious or spiritual. Any more than we have to agree with you (although some of us agree with you more than you’d ever realized if your views on religion are simplistic enough). But it’s best to treat us with respect, not condescension, and don’t reduce meaningful life experiences to a disease. Doing all that is similar to religious people running around saying people are only atheists because they’re deficient in morals and compassion. Don’t.

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