Re: It's all over but the pouting
Posted: Fri Jan 22, 2021 8:38 pm
Yours and similar sentiments from MeDotOrg, Chap, Dr.W., et al on this thread resonate deeply with me too. I can't dismiss, nor do I want to dismiss the years of community support, love, and kindness I shared with and still enjoy from most of the family and friends I grew up with during my years of active participation in the Church, though I have come to realize that most of its deepest foundational truth claims are basically nonsense. I still enjoy much of the religious music, especially around the Christmas holidays, with its message of "peace, goodwill towards men."Some Schmo wrote: ↑Fri Jan 22, 2021 6:54 pmYeah, I hear you, and I have to admit that I have retained certain things from my religious youth. For instance, I'm still moved by the Christmas season, including some of the more religious music. The month of December holds very strong feelings for me from my youth, and I have no desire to jettison that stuff, because they contain some of my best memories of home and family.
And if I'm honest, I liked many of the conversations I had in church. They provided the spark of interest in philosophical ideas. Just because where they landed was BS didn't mean they weren't asking some good questions.
I loved participating in the annual concert of Handel's Messiah that has been put on by our local Symphony and Oratorio Society, year after year, without a break until the past year's pandemic forced its cancellation for the first time in its history. Many had participated in it without fail every year for decades, either as participants or audience members. There is at least one elderly lady who had either performed in it or attended it for more than 8 decades without fail, even coming back our community to attend every year from the community in which she now resides, more than 50 miles away. I also sang with the Master Chorale group I also belong to in both their annual Spring and Christmas concerts, with the latter consisting, of course, of holiday music, both religious and secular. It was a great disappointment to me that both those concerts had to be cancelled last year, along with (almost certainly) this year's Spring concert. This is one of the biggest reasons I hate this pandemic so much! Hopefully, both the Oratorio Society and the Master Chorale's holiday concerts will be resumed this year. I greatly look forward to that!
I can't say I thought of it quite that way before I read that, but it makes sense to me now. I think that this is what religion should really be all about, not worship of hypothetical, man made deities whose existence or non-existence is objectively unverifiable by deliberate design.I'd only quibble with that to say "my spirituality is kindness" instead. Religion is dogma. Spirituality is practice/action.
That's how I think of them, anyway.
It's outstanding!